kostis velonis

The Story of Klement Tchtatelnikov

2012-02-04T12:34:00.000-08:00

This interview took place back in January on the occasion of the exhibition of Stephanos Kamaris at the Cheap Art Gallery in Athens, 7/2-9/3/2012. The interview is also published in an exhibition catalogue by the editions Futura, 2012.

Kostis Velonis - You engage with the Soviet past, while being aware of both sides. There is, indeed, a good side, that of those who resisted Stalin’s hell, through poetry and the various ingenious inventions of escape, as in the case of your hero, K. Tchtatelnikov.

Stephanos Kamaris - When I built my first wish-machine several years ago, I didn’t know anything about all that - and I still don’t. I placed a plexiglass lid on the machine and then thought of adding a label: “Wish-machine. Found in ... (date) in the frozen lands of Siberia. Considered to be the Soviet answer to Aladdin’s lamp.” I suppose I just really liked Cyrillic letters, both visually and due to that lovely mystery they create - you can understand a bit (it’s not Chinese, say), but not enough. More generally, it must also be due to that rather strange sensation that Russian history inspires, it may also be due to the various odd objects I used to see in my grandmother’s house, or even the badges and handkerchiefs my godfather used to give me when I was small - my other grandfather went on to use the handkerchiefs, when he and my grandmother still visited Greece, for cleaning shoes and other items. I think that this last detail (and the combination in general) may explain quite a lot (not to go into family matters) and is probably the reason why I can view this Soviet past more easily and critically, but also relatively cheerfully. But it’s their fault too, I mean it’s not just my impression that these Soviet objects were often very amusing and identified with self-destruction. I can think of quite a few. In any case, this story gradually took on its present form - and perhaps it was logical that it should take this direction - once the word “Siberia” appeared on the first label. The first wish-machines, however, were intended to throw coins into a well I’d built.

Stephanos Kamaris "Klement Tchtatelnikov - Magic Machine/ Icarus II", circa 1929 (80x50x40 cm)

K.Velonis- Your morphological undertaking has to do with the attempt to gather and ultimately group together narrative “utilitarian” objects in an oppositional relationship between Tchtatelnikov and Bozov. Good versus evil, which can also be a complementary relationship.

S.Kamaris- Certainly. In one of the boxes containing the personal items of the two protagonists, you can see a large pair of scissors. There I mention that the scissors once belonged to Bozov, who was a very good friend of Tchtatelnikov until he discovered that Tchtatelnikov had stolen them. So this great conflict is sparked off by this incident, with Bozov taking on the role of the bad guy more out of obstinacy than anything else. But as the story unfolds, I find Bozov becoming more and more likeable, because despite his medals and his obvious copying of his former friend’s wish-machine with the prescribed-wish machine (the one with the hammer-and-sickle that stops at an ex-voto), for me he is the truly unhappy one. And I thought of restoring his honour somehow... by having him commit suicide, or suddenly become paranoid at some gathering and start to shoot officers indiscriminately and so on. But anyway, yes, here he roughly symbolises evil, but I deliberately gave him a round and rather funny face, because I probably want him to be saved too.

K.V- While the plot of your work and the consistency of your materials is reminiscent of the atmosphere of a Dostoyevsky, Gorky or Solzhenitsyn novel, the way in which you remake your relationship with the material has a wider cultural significance; sometimes it even makes me think of the California School, for instance the assemblage guru Edward Kienholz.

S.K -I’m getting quite embarrassed now, as, after my ignorance of Soviet history, my ignorance of art and sculpture history is revealed. I might say that my excuse is that I supposedly studied painting, while my first work was probably on comics... That’s gone now, but anyway, I’ve just looked at Kienholz, I knew a few of his works (mainly the one with the pinball machine), and I can make out the affinities you mentioned. I only wish I could make things like that one day, though to be honest I’ve no idea what direction I might take in future. But I see a rather caustic mood in his work, and a mixture of different materials which I find quite familiar. Due to my origins, my dual nationality if you will, and the various disparate stimuli I received growing up, I often feel closer to certain foreign artists. The Balkan or the oriental element, so to say, are much more foreign to me, even though I’ve lived here in Greece almost my whole life. So maybe thanks to this rather fresh, if I can call it that, multiculturalism which distinguishes American history, I can more easily find affinities with artists there - when, of course, there are also affinities in character and way of thinking... I’m probably just talking at random. Never mind.

Stephanos Kamaris, "Klement Tchtatelnikov - Wish Monument", circa 1929 (120x70x50cm)

K.V- It’s probably not very important whether you know your “spiritual” relatives or not; once some possible similarities arise due to idiosyncrasy and common cultural references, it is inevitable that this story of genealogy will be repeated ad infinitum even if you or anybody else is disinclined to take it seriously. Do you believe that the viewer has the right to perceive your sculpture exclusively in static terms, as a composition in which he does not need to perceive the mechanical movement? Because in all your constructions there is always the ghost of a structure in progress, an imminent event, due to the fact that they are constructions that can offer movement, like the wish-machines for example, and also their noise when they are put into operation.

S.K- What I realise, and really makes me think, is that I’m not at all sure of my works. I don’t know if they can stand up if I remove all this history, if I remove the glass boxes and labels. But there again, I like writing and making up mythologies, I mean to say that I have never used anything with an ulterior motive, to conceal some other weakness. As to the other thing, what you’re probably really asking, I’m afraid the answer’s yes. But unfortunately, I too have got used to them being motionless and soundless, mainly for practical reasons. The machines are particularly sensitive, so half the time when I put them into operation something goes wrong and they won’t work. And even when they do, I stop them quickly because I’m afraid the worst might happen. Sometimes they seem to be avenging themselves for all the previous failed attempts and start speeding up exponentially. At least with the Antimachine, for example, I know that I can’t leave it on by definition, because - if it works - in about a minute (more or less) it will have sawn through its base and become something else. Also, in “Me and Bozov #2 and 3” (I gave it two numbers because I thought the character could change depending on the side it’s viewed from), the combustion construction, I made sure it was inoperable from the start (which wasn’t difficult), to avoid causing any damage. And you’re quite right about the noise you mention. Unfortunately though, purely for practical reasons of the machines’ survival, I can’t have them working for more than a very short time.

Stephanos Kamaris "Vitaliy Bozov - “Ready-Wish Machine”, also known as the “commissioned wish machine”, circa 1930.

K.V- Observing your constructions, I am tempted to find some analogies with modern art history, particularly a pioneering view that envisioned the application of science and engineering to sculpture, for example the industrial universe of kinetic sculpture.

S.K- I would love to have the knowledge to be able to combine science and art, but unfortunately I can’t. Of course, even there I believe that something always predominates. Searching for influences, I think first of Da Vinci, who was always been my favourite hero. But physics and chemistry were lessons I was always extremely bad at, although I would have liked it to be otherwise. All these machines are based mostly on the conversion of circular into linear motion, just as we see in train wheels, in the way they are connected. There’s nothing clever about them (I mean my own machines). I don’t think Tinguely influenced me either, as I wasn’t aware of him when I started building the machines. Duchamp probably did, and so did the famous German band Einstürzende Neubauten, with the various crazy instruments made by its members.
I’ve just remembered a small photograph I once saw in an art history book. It must have been by Giacometti, a very simple and beautiful structure, something like a male-female, with a sort of banana if I remember right, revolving or going up and down over a sphere - without an engine - but probably perpetually. That has certainly influenced me subconsciously in the construction with the theoretical combustion - where Klement Tchtatelnikov as a sphere with matches moves towards a revolving pyramid with sandpaper rings - Bozov. In two more works, again, the wish-machine with the rat built by Tchtatelnikov in prison and the Antimachine, in the little red sticks bearing the razor blades, I think I’ve been influenced by your own works.
K.V- You are referring to the best-known photographic version of the “Suspended Ball” in the Guggenheim Museum, from what I believe is Giacometti’s most creative period, before he became identified with his famous thin, elongated Impressionist figures. This playful mood of a metaphysics of mechanics which is common to you and to his early work, helps me to better apprehend a sort of Dadaist transcendence in your work, with technological know-how being used in order to be refuted, to lead from the invention to its ridicule, something which is evident in the construction with the sphere of matches moving towards the revolving sandpaper pyramid.

S.Kamaris, "Klement Tchtatelnikov - Wish-Machine № 5" (/Rat Machine),found in Solovki, where Klement Tchtatelnikov spent 8 years as a prisoner

S.K -Yes, that’s the one I meant, I hadn’t seen it since then and I still love it. Now, as regards the machines... They really do have something comical and ridiculous about them... But I’d better start at the beginning, with the completely useless and malfunctioning wish-machines, which just push a few coins, without of course being able to fulfil their promises. The starting-point was the habit, probably human above all (?), of dreaming and wishing for something better. When we throw a coin in the water and wish for something. I love this habit... maybe visually too, with the metal and the water. And it’s something that never stops. As a priest says, probably in 8½, we didn’t come into this world to be happy. With the “wish monument” - which does not have any mechanical function - I am also referring to this last, drawing a parallel with the wishes we make on falling stars: in this work, the wish-stars which have been fulfilled are essentially dead, as they have a bullet in their centre. So although this should normally have been a work symbolising happiness, it’s a common graveyard. But on the right we see a new star appearing again, and we start over... On the other hand, the inability of these machines to fulfil their promises clearly has something human and vulnerable about it. And from a political point of view, one could contrast these machines with the faceless and terrifying Communist regime. For me, in other words, these machines are more human than the supposedly joyful faces we see in Soviet propaganda posters. They are certainly machines, but machines running in reverse...
Let me refer here to the “Antimachine”, since you mentioned transcendence. This machine, whose concept, to be honest, seems far too simple for me not to have copied it from somewhere else - even if unconsciously - is a machine that becomes detached from itself. It is supported solely on a couple of springs and gnaws away at itself, or at least at its truly mechanical part, that which has nothing human about it, until it finally falls and is released from it. I’d originally given it a second title, “Scorpion Committing Suicide”. I’d also written a short poem (in English and then I developed it a bit), along the lines of:
Two insects dream of their future helmets,
I’ll be an astronaut, says the ant,
I’ll be a fireman, says the scorpion.
Something like that... So there goes the scorpion... But I finally decided that this was all wrong, because the Antimachine probably doesn’t commit suicide. It’s rather that it kills one of its selves, the purely mechanical one. In any case the title “Antimachine” is fairly appropriate and I think it’s enough. Now I think the poem was wrong too, as the scorpion might have achieved its transcendence, but then it would have had to be called “The Scorpion’s Revenge”, which I wouldn’t have liked at all.

K.V-The beginning of the poem is amazing... but let’s move on to the other works. The contest between Bozov and Tchtatelnikov in a final chess game with quite radically altered rules. What does this difference in the rules constitute? Evolution, revolution or sabotage?

S.K- Thank you very much... These different rules are obviously sabotage against Klement Tchtatelnikov, but one that he is probably responsible for, since I don’t think the game was ever played - I don’t think even Bozov himself would have agreed to play on such favourable terms, with over twice as many pawns and roughly an extra 4 points. Obviously the knight in chess is identified with the unexpected, with freedom (as opposed to the bishop of the same value, for example, which is a tower that moves diagonally), and therefore with the revolution. One could also say this of the pawn, since this is the only piece - with a lot of work, of course - which has the magical property of transformation. Practically, however, as any chess-player knows, the pawn always turns into a queen (like some powerful trade unionists). So I chose to use it basically for Bozov’s needs, as two rows of pawns would give him a sense of safety to start with, and of course he could also sacrifice many of them as required. So we have six knights versus two rooks, four bishops and another eight pawns, which probably means admitting defeat in advance - so this game expresses a more general futility. I tried to make them both play as well as possible (or at least make Bozov play relatively tolerably), and the fact that the game managed to reach 33 moves shows that there may have been some small hope for Klement Tchtatelnikov. The title, apart from the obvious political references, also refers to the “Evergreen Game”, an actual game played between Anderssen and Dufresne in 1852 which has gone down in history for its beauty.

Klement Tchtatelnikov - Me and Bozov # 2&3, circa 1945 (30x33x18cm)

K.V- Tchtatelnikov is recognised as a humble mortal who will be glorified for his ingenuity, his resourcefulness and, finally, his actual sense of humour, which sometimes makes the human race seem likeable. In fact, however, in the gulags there was no intention among all those thousands of dissidents of having a heroic and glorious death.
Does your own antihero represent these souls consciously, as far as you are concerned, or do you limit yourself to the requirements of the narrative? What is your ideological position?

S.K- Although I haven’t read any books on the subject, I did glance at Appelbaum’s on the Internet and bought the encyclopaedia of Russian prison tattoos (2 and 3), and I also remember I saw a book on eBay referring to plays being put on in Solovki Gulag itself. From the tattoo books I learnt that political prisoners were tortured by various common murderers, etc., with the blessings of the guards. And that the usual term for political dissidents was eight years. That’s what Tchtatelnikov got. Since, as I told you, I knew nothing about the subject, I wanted to avoid something completely simplistic like “he was sent to the gulag and died there”. From what I read, many people managed to survive. In a museum in Riga I also saw various beautiful objects made by inmates, and I thought that maybe - depending on the circumstances and at least in secret - someone might be able to make something while he was a prisoner. And of course it suited the story itself that Klement Tchtatelnikov should get out of there alive, so he would be able to refer to his experiences afterwards. (I’ve also thought of sending him to America to make completely different works, or to Uruguay where he could have, unbeknown to him, a former Nazi for a neighbour - more for fun than anything else).
Now, to answer the question, I won’t say anything groundbreaking: I’m in favour of freedom of the individual, and in favour of honesty, in a rather vague and general way. I don’t know if there are any perfect systems of government, but I do know that there is always a huge gap between theory and practice. I could call myself a leftist, but again I don’t know; all that requires a consistency that I haven’t got, and I don’t know whether people like me should appropriate the term just because it sounds good. And when I see certain public figures, especially, trying to identify themselves with the left, just making a noise, while their whole life’s attitude is based on abuse of power, I get really annoyed. So I’d better not say anything. If I talk about anarchism, maybe again it’s just a convenient word which can be applied to anything, and in my case means simply opportunism in a supposedly revolutionary wrapping. I really don’t know how to answer at all. If, of course, I didn’t think there was something good in the Communist system, I wouldn’t bother with it or criticise it. I mean to say, I wouldn’t be as interested in portraying a comparable case of a hero in the Nazi regime. There, I think things would be much simpler, and the potential hero would immediately be a superhero... So I was interested in this coexistence of good and evil, not in evil in its pure form. That, again, may sound pro-Stalinist... What can I say, I’m against all those organised situations...

K.V- With your myth-making you are sharing your knowledge of a man’s past, as though you were responsible for preserving and finally exhibiting his personal archive. By this choice you are undermining, at least theoretically, your own quality of creator, since the executor of the work is K. Tchtatelnikov himself and, in a few cases, Bozov. Apart from the special circumstances of the concept of the group, which demand distancing as a technique for better utilisation of the narrative, might there also be other reasons for this?

Stephanos Kamaris, "Klement Tchtatelnikov – Tchtatelnikov Square Model", 1/15 scale, circa 1929 (30x35x40 cm)

S.K -All right, I think this undermining is quite theoretical, as you say. But I must admit that I felt quite strange when, in one of the first versions of Klement Tchtatelnikov’s self-portrait after the gulag - the door with many eyes - I signed with his initials at the bottom… The initials have now been removed, though for aesthetic reasons. Certainly the answer requires a lot of psychoanalysis… Because it’s not the first time I’ve done something like this, and it can’t just be chance. As I told you before, I used to work - as a complete amateur - on comics. The technical part of my degree dissertation at the School of Fine Arts in Italy was entitled “The signature of Matthew Longthroat”. It was the story of a failed (at least until the final page, when things are reversed) artist, who was ashamed to sign his works, and who, whenever he did, quickly regretted it and erased his signature. I am very emotionally attached to this story, particularly the last panel. Later I also tried to write a novel, which I abandoned after some time. The hero was, again, a painter, but a relatively well-known one - as opposed to the previous hero. The plot, of course, was rather far-fetched - the painter had three secret pseudonyms (and identities), and a younger half-sister (with whom he had of course lost touch), who knew one of them because the hero had used it in the paintings he used to draw for her when they were both small. Things were so twisted that another, fourth identity of the hero was that of an art critic who constantly abused him in his reviews... So I think all this could do with psychoanalysis. It must be some sort of persecution complex. Perhaps I’m trying, out of fear or embarrassment, to find a somewhat safe point between creation and criticism, although these concepts are peculiarly relative and mutually inclusive to some degree in each case...

The Functional Architect

2012-02-02T03:57:00.000-08:00

The Functional Architect” building blocks designed by the architects A.A Schoug and G.Dalsgaard, 1935. The blocks were made in Danish prisons and sold by the Danish Toy Factory.

Wooden Flower

2012-02-02T03:53:00.000-08:00

Savvas Christodoulides
Wooden Flower, 2011
Wood, cardboard,glass
180 x 205 x 25

‘Decommission, Rewrite, and Change’ Franco Berardi alias Bifo

2012-01-30T05:19:00.000-08:00

Franco Berardi in a demonstration in in the seventies

Franco Berardi is one of the controversial Italian thinkers who are seeking a solution for the gradually collapsing capitalistic system. For him, the best method of fighting today’s abuses comes from an unexpected corner, through love. Only in this manner can the tormented social body recover after years of being driven into the ground.

Merijn Oudenampsen:
How do you look at the present crisis from the perspective on capitalism that you have developed in your work, which revolves around the interconnectedness of economy, language and psychology?
Franco Berardi:

‘Do you remember what happened at the end of the nineties and especially in the spring of the year 2000? After a decade of development, after the belief in the possibility of the infinite expansion of a virtual capitalism based on new technologies, there was a collapse. The bursting of the dot-com bubble. It was a very important moment. And in a sense, what happened in September 2008 in the United States and what is happening now in Europe can be considered as the long after-effects of the crisis of 2000. Because in that crisis, all the elements of novelty, of the new forms of capitalism which I like to call semiocapitalism, became apparent.

The idea of semiocapitalism is based on the interconnection of information technology and the production of economic value. But in this kind of relationship, the human brain and human sensibility is deeply involved as part of the production process, and it also has a fundamental role to play in consumption. The boom of the nineties was based on the exploitation of the human brain, if we look at it from the point of view of immaterial labour and from the attention economy, or rather, the invasion and occupation of our attention by new technologies. Writers like Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, Nicholas Negroponte: all those people were theorizing the possibility of what they called a long boom, an infinite boom. Their theories were deeply flawed, because they were unable to understand that the capacities of the human brain are not infinite. The human brain is limited with regard to physical energy, with regard to affection, with regard to desire, suffering and depression. The days of the long boom, the decade of the nineties, were also the years of Prozac. These were also the years of excitement, produced by the hyper-exploitation of the human mind and the intense use of euphoric drugs.

Now, the crisis of 2000 has been forgotten, because immediately after came the shock of September 11, the beginning of the infinite war launched by the Bush administration. This has been an insane escape from the effects of the crisis. It was an attempt to renew military production, but the war has not been a good pharmaceutic. You can compare it with a person who is in a deep depression, taking amphetamines. It is not the right therapy for depression.
Year after year, the global schizo-economy – a concept I use to bring together economic production and the exploitation of the mind – has been building up to a new, and I think final, collapse. What we see is the coming true of an old prediction, that of the Club of Rome, who in the year of 1972 published a report titled The Limits to Growth. Economic growth cannot be infinite, for a very simple reason. Namely that physical resources are limited, as well as the psychic and mental resources of human kind. The network form has hugely enlarged the possibilities of production, but we are limited as human beings.’
Merijn Oudenampsen:
One could say that whereas before, politics revolved around the promise to increase the size of the pie, characterized by ‘win-win’, presently it is limited to the evermore-bitter struggle over the distribution of what is left of it, a ‘zero-sum-game’. To give you an example, currently in the Netherlands the government has money to bail out the banks, to subsidize home-owners, to build roads, but in order to do that it extracts money from education, from culture, from handicapped people, from healthcare, from social housing and so on. Similar things are happening in Italy now, with the austerity package being implemented by Berlusconi. What is your take on that?
Franco Berardi:

‘I just came back from a demonstration that happened this morning in the city of Bologna. Students were protesting in front of the Banca de Italia, chanting slogans such as ‘more money for the schools, less money for the banks’ and so on. These kinds of protests are spreading all over Europe nowadays. Everybody understands that if you destroy the school system or something simple like the sewage system, let’s say the basic infrastructure of production, it will not help the future economy. But this is the current policy of the European Central Bank, this is the policy for dealing with the financial crisis at the European level. Look at what is happening in Greece, for instance. In Greece, in April 2010, the problem of that country’s huge public debt exploded. The Greek government was obliged to start a policy aimed at extracting resources from the economy in order to pay the German and French banks. Now, one and a half years after that decision, the Greece’s gross national product has fallen by seven percent. The result is that production is going down, and the debt, unavoidably, is skyrocketing up. It makes you wonder: Are those people leading the central bank crazy? Do they understand that what they are doing is totally crippling the basis of what is a healthy economy? Because you cannot withdraw resources from production, from effective demand, from society, and ask for the payment of the debt. That is impossible. I have the suspicion that they are not working on fixing the European economy. They perceive the end of something and they are looking towards a sort of hold-up, a robbery, a huge displacement of wealth from workers, from society, from education, towards the banks and the financial class.

I know that this can seem paranoid, and I do not like to be paranoid. But this is not the effect of a human conspiracy; I do not think it is Angela Merkel, Jean Claude Trichet or Nicolas Sarkozy who are masterminding this dark future. I think it is something that is deeply inscribed in the software of the financial architecture. We have been producing a machine that is only able to think in terms of fighting inflation, enhancing profits, and enforcing competition. The automated system, I mean the software, has been conceived in a form that has now turned destructive in relation to social wealth.
Just to say a word or two on Italy: during the last two years, eight billion Euros have been withdrawn from education. And a hundred thirty thousand teachers have been fired in the Italian schools. What do you think, is this the way to renew growth in Italy? Is it the way to think of the future of Italian society? Obviously not.’
Merijn Oudenampsen:
You just published a new book, After the Future. Could you tell us something about the book?
Franco Berardi:

‘I started writing the book in February of 2009. It was the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Futurist Manifesto. Futurism is a literary and artistic movement that has been hugely important, both culturally and politically. It can be seen as the first avant-garde movement, which was actively out to overturn society. What defines the Futurist Manifesto, and the Futurist culture in general? It is the exaltation of the virtues of the future. In a sense the futurist movement is an extreme version of the modern veneration of the future as progress, as expansion, and finally, as growth. There is no reason to assume that our idea of the future is something natural. Just think of the theological man of the middle ages: for him, perfection was not in the future. For him perfection was in the past, the time of paradise lost, when God created the world. Then there’s the Renaissance, when the idea comes up of a future produced by man, in a conscious and voluntarist way, politically and economically. In the nineteenth century, the idea of the future as progress becomes part of the human psyche. At the end of the twentieth century, this mythology comes to an end. First of all because of the crisis in the field of energy resources, especially fossil fuels, because of the awareness that growth cannot be infinite.

The beginning of that awareness was already present in the seventies, especially in the year 1977. The year when Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols went in the streets of London, crying ‘NO FUTURE’. That cry produced deep ripples in the youth culture of the following decades. After the Future is an attempt to rethink the present moment. We live in a time when the expectation of a progressive, expansive future proves illusionary. And it is a dangerous illusion, also because the world is getting old. The human population, not only in Europe but also in China, in India, in Latin America, with the exception of the Arabic world, is ageing. People are living longer and birth rates are going down. The physical energies of the planet are running out. So we have to live with the exhaustion, which can be a very interesting experience if we are able to face it in a non-aggressive and non-competitive way. We don’t need more things. We have too many things in our houses. We need more time, more affection, more solidarity. If we do not understand that, then war will become the only language between humans.
To finish, let me talk about an initiative, a call that I have written together with Geert Lovink. It is directed at the large army of lovers and the small army of software programmers. This is a call to resist, and our main point is that the movement that is coming to the streets in New York and Europe will not win this fight, because this fight cannot be won in the streets. Going to the streets is important, absolutely necessary. It is the way to start the real fight that will come afterwards. And what is the real fight? It is the fight of love. The ability to reactivate the bodies, the social and erotic body, that has been paralyzed by twenty years of precarization, by twenty years of impoverishment. Secondly, the real fight is the fight of software developers, of the people who have been writing the software of the financial system. We call on them in order for them to do what Wikileaks has done in the field of information: decommission, rewrite, and change the course of the future.

Source: http://metropolism.com
Metropolis M

Vandalism Series

2012-01-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

John Divola, Vandalism Series: archivally processed black and white photograph 20 x 16 inches, 1973-75.

The Leaves are Falling

2012-01-24T16:25:00.000-08:00

Here I am saying “The leaves are falling”
—one of those choruses
that vie with interminable verses
to mock hoarders.
Yeah, we get
that a palette of winds
is a pretty thing:
one blurs the anther, another
the river splurging on riprap,
expunging
phosphates,
out of the temperature
differential building
sculptural fogs
that promenade
between shores a glacier
wedged ajar, a fjord.
Whatever gives the river
its seriousness reverses
in the light
of those clouds moving
as if absorbing
their pomp in advance of it—
characters
which untied the painter
and took the sculls again.

Ange Mlinko
2008

Η Δελφική Ουτοπία

2012-01-23T02:04:00.000-08:00

Το «Δελφικό Κέντρο», ήταν ένα όραμα του Σικελιανού για την δημιουργία μιας αυτόνομης κοινότητας στους Δελφούς. Ένα πνευματικό κέντρο το οποίο θα προωθούσε την επαφή των επιστημόνων, των καλλιτεχνών και των πνευματικών ανθρώπων όλων των χωρών. Ένα κέντρο το οποίο θα μπορούσε να κατασκευαστεί μόνο στους Δελφούς, εκεί «στον ιερό χώρο των Αρχαίων Αμφικτιονιών».

Αυτό το όραμα του Σικελιανού, το οποίο ανέλαβε να σχεδιάσει ο Δημήτρης Πικιώνης, δίνοντας του τελικά μια μορφή η οποία παρέπεμπε σε έναν αρχαϊκό ή παραδοσιακό οικισμό, μας μιλάει αφενός για τη σχέση μοντερνισμού και αρχαιότητας και ειδικότερα για το πώς η αρχαιότητα επαναφέρεται συνειδητά στο προσκήνιο την μοντέρνα εποχή. Όπως ανέφερε ο Boissy το 1927 για τις Δελφικές Εορτές:
Το γεγονός τούτο αποτελεί δια την Ελλάδαν μαρτυρία της αναγεννήσεως της ευγενεστέρας αισθητικής.

Έτσι θα μπορούσε το παρελθόν να επανέρθει στην μοντέρνα εποχή ως κάτι το ζωντανό, ως ένα διαχρονικό αισθητικό πρότυπο το οποίο θα εδραίωνε τη συνέχεια ανάμεσα στην παράδοση και την πρωτοπορία. Το «Δελφικό Κέντρο» ως μία πρότυπη κοινότητα του μεσοπολέμου η οποία βαδίζει προς το μέλλον κοιτάζοντας πάντα πίσω της εκφράζει ακριβώς αυτό το όραμα ενός ιδεατού (υπεργήινου) μέλλοντος το οποίο πηγάζει από ένα εξιδανικευμένο μυθικό παρελθόν.

Αυτό το όραμα του Σικελιανού έμεινε όμως στα χαρτιά. Στα πολλά σχετικά κείμενα που έγραψε με πάθος ο ίδιος ο ποιητής, αλλά και στα αρκετά σκίτσα που μας άφησε ο Δημήτρης Πικιώνης, σκίτσα που βρίσκονται πολύ κοντά μας, μέσα σε αυτό εδώ το μουσείο.

Το «Δελφικό Κέντρο», έχει μείνει πλέον στη συνείδησή μας ως μια ουτοπία του ελληνικού μεσοπολεμικού μοντερνισμού. Και ως μια τέτοια ουτοπία θα επιχειρήσω να το δω σήμερα.

ΤΟ ΟΡΑΜΑ

Γνωστοί από τις ανασκαφές της Γαλλικής Σχολής, οι Δελφοί παρουσιάζονται, με τα λόγια του Theophile Homolle, ως ένας τόπος μεγαλείου, μυστηρίου, αποκάλυψης του θείου, παρουσίας των θεών. Κι όλα αυτά σε ενεστώτα χρόνο. Όχι κάτι που ήταν κάποτε, κάτι που υπήρχε στο παρελθόν, αλλά κάτι που είναι, εδώ και τώρα. Η αρχαία πολιτεία μάλιστα αναδύεται μέσα από το έδαφος, αφού πρώτα «καταπιεί» το Καστρί, τον σύγχρονο οικισμό, που δεν φαίνεται να έχει τίποτα το ιερό και το μαγευτικό. Το σημαντικό άρα είναι αυτό που είναι κάτω από το έδαφος, έρχεται από το παρελθόν για να αναβιώσει στο σήμερα.

Κρυμμένοι στην ενδοχώρα, απομονωμένοι από τους γύρω οικισμούς, οι Δελφοί δεσπόζουν πάνω στο βουνό. Με τα λόγια του Σικελιανού:

Ο Παρνασσός πλαισιώνεται πνευματικά απ’ τα Ιμαλάια, και απ’ οποιαδήποτε κορφή του οι μυημένοι αντικρίζουνε ακέριο τον ορίζοντα της Γης.

Όπως τα Ιμαλάια λοιπόν, έτσι και ένα ελληνικό βουνό, ο Παρνασσός υποδέχεται μια πολιτεία ιερή. Αντίστοιχα με τη σύνδεση Παρνασσός-Ιμαλάια γίνεται και η σύνδεση Δελφοί–Δελχί, αναδεικνύοντας έτσι μια πνευματική συγγένεια βασισμένη πάνω σε μια υποτιθέμενη κοινή γλωσσική καταγωγή.

Όπως και να έχει το μεταφυσικό περιεχόμενο είναι αυτό που κυριαρχεί. Ήδη το 1921 ο Σικελιανός γράφει στον Νίκο Καζαντζάκη σχετικά με ένα «κοσμικό μοναστήρι» που σχεδιάζει να οργανώσει, επαναφέροντας την ουτοπία του Campanella στη μοντέρνα εποχή.

Λίγα χρόνια μετά, το 1924, ο Σικελιανός θα εμφανιστεί πάνω στους Δελφούς ντυμένος «με το παχύ ένδυμα αρτίου ψευδοπροφήτου», όπως θα γράψει ο Τάκης Παπατσώνης, για να μιλήσει για το Δελφικό όραμα, για την προσπάθειά του να «μυήσει τον κόσμο σε μία νέα χαώδη θρησκεία».

Ποιά είναι όμως εκείνα τα χαρακτηριστικά που μας κάνουν να μιλάμε για ουτοπία; Σε μια πρώτη προσέγγιση το Δελφικό Κέντρο, όπως κάθε παραδοσιακή ουτοπία έχει μια εμμονή στην οριοθέτηση, την περιχαράκωση, τη διάκριση ανάμεσα στο μέσα και το έξω. Στον Thomas More είναι η μεγάλη τάφρος ανάμεσα στο νησί και την ενδοχώρα. Στο Δελφικό Κέντρο, το τοίχος και η πύλη που σχεδιάζει ο Πικιώνης σε διαφορετικές μορφές, εκφράζουν συμβολικά, άλλοτε εντονότερα και άλλοτε πιο διακριτικά, αυτό το όριο που εξασφαλίζει αυτονομία και αυτάρκεια.

Όπως κάθε σοβαρή ουτοπία, έτσι και το Δελφικό Κέντρο δεν μπορεί παρά να έχει και ένα ορισμένο πολιτικό υπόβαθρο. Ο Σικελιανός θα υιοθετήσει μια ξεκάθαρη ρητορική την οποία συναντάμε εκείνη την εποχή και αλλού στην Ευρώπη. Αντίθετος στον αστισμό και τον καπιταλισμό, / θλιβερά φαινόμενα μιας σημιτικής ιδεολογίας όπως γράφει, θα κηρύξει τους Δελφούς ως κέντρο εναντίον του κάθε είδους υλισμού. Θα ευαγγελιστεί την Αρεία «ηθική και διανοητικότητα» απ’ όπου πηγάζουν αξίες όπως ο αλτρουισμός, η γενναιότητα, η αλληλεγγύη. Θα επιτεθεί στην «αχαμνή σημιτική του Μαρξ θεωρία» και θα προτιμήσει το ηγετικό προφίλ του Λένιν, αλλά και το αναρχικό πνεύμα του Κροπότκιν.

Ωστόσο το Δελφικό Κέντρο δεν θα ακολουθήσει ένα ριζοσπαστικό κοινωνικό μοντέλο, ούτε θα προτείνει ένα νέο, καλύτερο πολιτικό σύστημα. Η αντίδραση στην αστική δημοκρατία και τον υλισμό δεν είναι μια ρήξη προς τα εμπρός, αλλά μία επαναφορά στη σιγουριά του πίσω, στην ολιγαρχία, την αριστοκρατία, ακόμα κι αν μιλάμε για την πνευματική αριστοκρατία των «εκλεκτών». Αυτή η στροφή η οποία υπαγορεύεται από τη νοσταλγία και εμφανίζεται ως πρωτοπορία, είναι κάτι που συναντάμε βέβαια συχνά σε ουτοπίες του μοντερνισμού. Σε αυτήν την περίπτωση το προσδοκώμενο δεν είναι αυτό που δεν έχει έρθει ακόμα, δεν είναι δηλαδή η αναζήτηση άλλων πιθανών εκβάσεων της πολιτικής και της ιστορίας όπως θα ήθελε ο Ernst Bloch, αλλά η αναπόληση αυτού που δεν υπάρχει πια. Όχι το pas encore, αλλά το αντίθετό του, το non plus.

Στον τομέα της οικονομίας και της παραγωγής το Δελφικό Κέντρο είναι εκείνη η περίπτωση όπου η μοντέρνα ουτοπία νοσταλγεί την προβιομηχανική κοινωνία. Βαδίζοντας πάνω σε μια λογική τύπου Morris ο Σικελιανός τονίζει την αξία της κοινοβιακής μη αλλοτριωμένης εργασίας και παρουσιάζει τα δικά του «νέα από το πουθενά». Θέτει ως προϋπόθεση της κατασκευής του ίδιου του Κέντρου την εθελοντική δουλειά των τοπικών μαστόρων, αλλά και «των αστέγων της Δελφικής περιοχής και των άλλων Ελλήνων, προσφύγων και μη». Έτσι «τα έξοδα για την ανέγερση αυτή των κτηρίων του συνοικισμού, της κοινότητας και του Δελφικού Κέντρου θα περιορίζονταν στο ελάχιστο, χάρη στην εθελοντική προσωπική εργασία χιλιάδων Ελλήνων».

Η Δελφική κοινότητα στο μυαλό του Σικελιανού θα μπορούσε επίσης να είναι αυτόνομη, να ζει από την εκμετάλλευση της δικής της γεωργικής και βιοτεχνικής παραγωγής. Σε αυτό το πλαίσιο είναι που εντάσσεται και η τέχνη. Η τέχνη όχι ως έργα για το μουσείο, αλλά ως διακοσμημένα αντικείμενα μιας χρηστικής λειτουργίας. Η τέχνη ως καθημερινή πρακτική, σε ένα αυτοτελές σύνολο, έναν αυτόνομο και αυτάρκη οικισμό, έναν κόσμο σταθερό και πλήρη. Τόσο πλήρη ώστε και η ίδια η τέχνη να μοιάζει περιττή.

Η ΠΡΑΓΜΑΤΙΚΟΤΗΤΑ

Όπως κι αν είχαν τα πράγματα όμως στο όραμα του Σικελιανού ή στα σχέδια του Πικιώνη, η πορεία από τη φαντασία στην πραγματικότητα δεν ήταν εύκολη. Από νωρίς είχε γίνει σε όλους σαφές ότι αυτή η κοινότητα, όσο τέλεια και αν λειτουργούσε, δεν θα μπορούσε να σταθεί στα δικά της πόδια χωρίς εξωτερική βοήθεια. Γι αυτό και ο Σικελιανός εναπόθετε τις περισσότερες ελπίδες του στον τουρισμό. Ο Σικελιανός εμφανίζονταν σίγουρος ότι οι Δελφοί μπορούν να γίνουν ένας προορισμός ιδιαίτερα σημαντικός. Πόσο σημαντικός; Στο μυαλό του Σικελιανού οι Δελφοί, έχοντας μια παγκόσμια εμβέλεια θα μπορέσουν άνετα να ξεπεράσουν σε επισκεψιμότητα το ταπεινό Salzburg. Οι ακτοπλοϊκές γραμμές θα συνέδεαν την Ιτέα με την κεντρική και βόρεια Ευρώπη και από τα δεκάδες υπερωκεάνια θα έφταναν εκατομμύρια τουρίστες. Το μέγεθος των Δελφών δεν μπορούσε να θεωρείται μειονέκτημα. Όπως σε κάθε ουτοπία, η μικρή κοινότητα είχε σημασία αντιστρόφως ανάλογη του μεγέθους της και εμβέλεια που ξεπερνούσε κατά πολύ τα γεωγραφικά της όρια.

Η προσδοκία των εσόδων που θα έφερνε ο τουρισμός ήταν και αυτή που ενθουσίαζε τον τύπο της εποχής. Θα δούνε οι ξένοι, γράφανε οι εφημερίδες, ότι δεν υπάρχουν μόνο οι Δελφοί και τα αρχαία αλλά και η Αράχοβα με το τσαρούχι, τη φλογέρα και το δημοτικό της τραγούδι. Κάπως έτσι είδε το θέμα και η πολιτεία που άρχισε να σκέφτεται ζεστά το ενδεχόμενο κατασκευής ενός μεγάλου ξενοδοχείου, ένα ενδεχόμενο που έμοιαζε να προχωράει κάποια στιγμή. Ο υπουργός συμφώνησε, ο οργανισμός τουρισμού το ενέκρινε, το οικόπεδο βρέθηκε και απαλλοτριώθηκε. Τότε όμως εμφανίστηκε ένα πρακτικό πρόβλημα. Το νερό της Κασταλίας πηγής δεν έφτανε για να καλύψει μεγάλες ξενοδοχειακές εγκαταστάσεις και η σκέψη για μεταφορά νερού απαιτούσε τεχνικά και οικονομικά μέσα τα οποία η πολιτεία δεν ήταν διατεθειμένη να δώσει. Ο τύπος δεν έκρυβε τις ανησυχίες του: λόγω της έλλειψης νερού, η Δελφική Ιδέα κινδύνευε να γίνει Ουτοπία.

Οι ανησυχίες επαληθεύτηκαν όταν η έλλειψη ενός τέτοιου ξενοδοχείου υποδοχής εμφανίστηκε με δραματικό τρόπο στις δεύτερες Δελφικές Εορτές. Τότε ήταν που κατά τη διάρκεια των παραστάσεων, μια βροχή έφτασε για να προκαλέσει το χάος και να κάνει το όνειρο εφιάλτη. Οι δρόμοι έκλεισαν, ο χώρος γέμισε λάσπη, τα πρόχειρα καταλύματα έμπαζαν από παντού. Καλοντυμένοι κύριοι έβριζαν και κυρίες με σπασμένα τακούνια μετάνιωναν για τον ερχομό τους στους Δελφούς. Όπως έγραψαν και οι εφημερίδες οι επισκέπτες:

Μεταννούσαν δια των ερχομό των εις τους Δελφούς ως εάν να είχαν κάμη την μεγαλειτέραν τρέλλαν της ζωής τους!

Ο Βενιζέλος πάλι ασχολούνταν με πιο επείγοντα προβλήματα. Ο αντιακριδικός αγώνας του φαινόταν σημαντικότερος. Προκειμένου να εξοντωθούν οι ακρίδες προτιμότερο θα ήταν να σταματήσουν οι Δελφικές Εορτές. Η επίσημη πολιτεία έμοιαζε να έχει άλλες προτεραιότητες. Το Δελφικό Κέντρο φλέρταρε πλέον επικίνδυνα με την Ουτοπία.

Όσο η Ελλάδα φαινόταν απρόθυμη και δυσκίνητη στην πορεία υλοποίησης του Δελφικού Κέντρου, τόσο ο Σικελιανός προσπαθούσε να κάνει το όραμά του μια διεθνή υπόθεση. Το 1928, σε μία ελληνογαλλική συνάντηση στο Παρίσι, ο Σικελιανός προτείνει, μια συμβολική κίνηση. Τη μεταφορά του ιερού πυρός από τον τάφο του άγνωστου στρατιώτη στο Παρίσι, στον ναό του Απόλλωνα στους Δελφούς. Οι συνδαιτυμόνες, ανάμεσα στους οποίους προσωπικότητες όπως ο Gabriel Boissy, ο Mario Mennier κ.α. ενθουσιάζονται στην ιδέα. Αυτοί που αντιδρούν όμως είναι ιταλοί δημοσιογράφοι οι οποίοι την θεώρησαν μια «γαλλική πνευματική προπαγάνδα», ένα ελληνογαλλικό μέτωπο ενάντια στην πρόσφατη ελληνοϊταλική συμμαχία.

Πιθανά εκείνη την περίοδο που βρίσκεται στο Παρίσι, το 1928, ο Σικελιανός είναι που έχει και την ιδέα για μια διεθνή έκθεση μοντέρνας τέχνης στους Δελφούς με έργα των Picasso, Braque, Derain, Léger κ.α. καθώς και η πρόσκληση στον Le Corbusier να έρθει να την διοργανώσει. Παράλληλα ο Σικελιανός συνεχίζει τις επαφές του με τους Γάλλους διανοούμενους ελπίζοντας σε ένα ακόμα οργανωμένο ταξίδι στους Δελφούς, χωρίς όμως να έχει το επιθυμητό αποτέλεσμα. Από την άλλη, ούτε η Εύα Πάλμερ καταφέρνει να βρει οικονομική υποστήριξη για το Δελφικό Κέντρο στην Αμερική. Αν και απευθύνεται σε πολλούς – από παλιούς γνωστούς μέχρι και το ίδρυμα Rockefeller - όλοι ακούν με ενδιαφέρον το σχέδιο για το Δελφικό Κέντρο κανένας όμως δεν έχει τη διάθεση να το ενισχύσει οικονομικά. Η Ουτοπία έρχεται ένα βήμα πιο κοντά.

Η ΟΥΤΟΠΙΑ ΠΟΥ ΕΓΙΝΕ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑ

Στην εποχή του Μεσοπολέμου, το Δελφικό Κέντρο αποτέλεσε μία μοναδική περίπτωση για την Ελλάδα, ένα φιλόδοξο όραμα χωρίς προηγούμενο. Η Δελφική Ουτοπία εμφανίστηκε ως μία πρόταση για ένα νέο, μοντέρνο, πνευματικό κέντρο το οποίο θα αναβίωνε τις αισθητικές αρχές και αξίες του παρελθόντος.

Η Ελλάδα του 1920 και του 1930 όμως, δεν έβλεπε την αναβίωση της αρχαιότητας με την ιδιαίτερη ματιά του Σικελιανού ή του Πικιώνη, αλλά μόνο ως ευκαιρία οικονομικής ανάπτυξης μιας μικρής αποδυναμωμένης περιοχής μέσω του τουρισμού. Οι περισσότεροι πολιτικοί μπορεί να έμοιαζαν ενθουσιασμένοι με το Δελφικό όραμα, αλλά πίσω από αυτό έβλεπαν μάλλον τα χρήματα που θα εισέρχονταν στα ταμεία ή τους ψήφους από την τοπική κοινωνία. Μια κοινωνία η οποία σαν όραμα για το δικό της μέλλον πιθανά δεν είχε τις εικόνες με τις χλαμύδες και τα δόρατα των δελφικών εορτών, αλλά τις διαφημίσεις από τις ηλεκτρικές κουζίνες και τα ψυγεία που έβρισκε λίγο πιο δίπλα, στις ίδιες σελίδες των εφημερίδων της εποχής.

Εκεί ακριβώς είναι που εισάγεται στην όλη ιστορία μία αντίφαση. Ποιά; Μα ακριβώς το γεγονός ότι για να λειτουργήσει ο «αρχαϊκός κόσμος» του Δελφικού Κέντρου θα έπρεπε να υποστηριχθεί από πλήθος μοντέρνα έργα, δίκτυα και κατασκευές. Δρόμους, αυτοκίνητα, καράβια, λιμάνια, επικοινωνίες. Αυτό που θα επέτρεπε στο παρελθόν να αναβιώσει θα ήταν με άλλα λόγια η μοντέρνα εποχή. Για να υλοποιηθεί η Δελφική Ουτοπία και να γίνει πραγματικότητα, το Δελφικό Κέντρο θα έπρεπε να πάψει να είναι ουτοπία και να γίνει ιστορία.

Αν όμως υπάρχει κάτι που δεν μπορεί να γίνει η ουτοπία αυτό είναι ιστορία. Τουλάχιστον η μοντέρνα ουτοπία η οποία εμφανίζεται ως κατεξοχήν αντι-ιστορική, ως ένας κόσμος ο οποίος είναι έξω από την ιστορία. Έτσι και το Δελφικό Κέντρο, ως μοντέρνα ουτοπία, αναφέρεται σε μια ονειρική συνθήκη, σε μία ιδανική εποχή όπου στην πολιτική δεν υπάρχει η σύγκρουση και στην κοινωνία δεν υπάρχει ο μόχθος. Σε μια εποχή δηλαδή όπου, θα έχει πλέον επέλθει το τέλος της ιστορίας.

Στην αρχετυπική ουτοπία του More, ο Ούτοπος ιδρύει και φτιάχνει μια πολιτεία εκ του μηδενός, χωρίς καμιά αναφορά σε καταγωγή, προγόνους και παρελθόν. Στην περίπτωση του Δελφικού Κέντρου έχουμε το ακριβώς αντίθετο. Μια ουτοπία η οποία φτιάχνεται ακριβώς πάνω σε αυτό που ήδη υπάρχει ή μάλλον από αυτό που ήδη υπάρχει, από αποσπάσματα και μέρη του πραγματικού και συμβολικού του σώματος. Μήπως λοιπόν, θα έπρεπε να είμαστε πιο προσεκτικοί όταν χαρακτηρίζουμε το Δελφικό Κέντρο ως Ουτοπία; Ίσως. Η αλήθεια είναι ότι αυτήν τη λέξη ο Σικελιανός και ο Πικιώνης δεν την χρησιμοποίησαν ποτέ.

Κωστας Τσιαμπαος

Εισηγηση απο το συνεδριο "Παρίσι - Αθήνα 1919-1939. Το διπλό ταξίδι" με θέμα τις καλλιτεχνικές και πνευματικές σχέσεις Ελλάδας-Γαλλίας μεταξύ 1919-1939. Μουσειο Μπενακη, 20 Ιανουαρίου.
Source:kostastsiambaos.blogspot.com/

DIY bookshelf

2012-01-20T17:05:00.001-08:00

Piazza della Repubblica, Roma, 2012

Postcard from Athens

2012-01-17T14:31:00.001-08:00

Protests in Athens, December 2011

‘Athens is the new Berlin.’ This hopeful phrase, constantly repeated by visitors to the 3rd Athens Biennale, and by the artists who have moved to Athens to take advantage of the cheap rents and cultural climate, may or may not be true. There are many contenders for the title – Buenos Aires, even Warsaw – but what is indisputable is that Athens is the leader in EU econ-disaster tourism.
A recent trip to Athens revealed: empty office buildings replete with derelict storefronts, even edging upon city’s main square; manned police barricades separating the haute-bourgeois Kolonaki district from the anarchist Exarchia quarter next door; junkies everywhere, clusters of them nodding outside the National Archeological Museum, almost outnumbering the sprinkling of tourists heading in; a charming nativity scene on in a central square, one of the few on display, only left unmolested because of 24/7 police protection. These scenes are merely the visible manifestations of the country’s alarming underlying economic statistics. Youth unemployment is currently approaching 50%, while Greece’s health has also been affected by the economic crisis. According to The Lancet, ‘Suicides rose by 17% in 2009 from 2007 and unofficial 2010 data quoted in parliament mention a 25% rise compared with 2009.’ Also in The Lancet, ‘an authoritative report described accounts of deliberate self-infection (HIV) by a few individuals to obtain access to benefits of €700 per month and faster admission onto drug substitution programmes.’
But these statistics distract from the fact that, until recently at least, Greece was a middle-class and middle-income country. This isn’t yet ancient history – much remains. When I was there in December, I saw trendy new cupcake chains situated next to Starbucks in the rich coastal suburbs; elsewhere, fashionable couples are moving to the fraying Omonia Square (where the nativity scene was guarded by the police), to live amidst the desolation. And for those who still have jobs, Greeks work very hard: the average work-week is 42 hours, compared to just under 36 hours for Germans. But the economy is continuing its downward spiral, and the end of the decline is not in sight, not even after potential default. The big money, as everyone believes, is parked in London, waiting for the inevitable fire sale of assets that is surely coming.

Matias Faldbakken, Untitled (Young is better than old) (2008), installation view of ‘MONODROME’, the 3rd Athens Biennial

Greece, though cut off economically, politically and even geographically, is not isolated culturally. In this respect it is still part of Western Europe and there are many continuing conversations. A tantalizing fragment of a conversation overheard in a taverna: ‘The tragedy of Vyner Street is…’ In the same taverna I spoke to a Greek museologist who said, ‘I just wish I could live in a more typical country, without out social problems.’ I asked her to elaborate on these problems – did she mean the junkies? ‘No, I mean our personal relationships. There is a hardening, of everyone out for themselves, and an inability to admit they are in trouble.’ She told me the final stages of this cycle is a drawing in and a personal isolation caused by having no money. And though a lack of money is sometimes associated with artistic and musical dynamism, as with the ’80s downtown scene in New York, this is not obviously true for Athens club culture. A musician told me that, ‘Before the crisis, I would was more careful about what gigs I would take, now I will do any job for the money. This is true for everyone I know.’
Greek cinema is the art form that is currently attracting the most international attention. Dogtooth, the 2009 film about a strange and isolated family living on a country estate, was nominated for an Oscar last year. This year’s Academy Awards entry from Greece is Attenberg (2010), about a girl who interprets life through watching David Attenborough (which she pronounces Attenberg) wildlife documentaries; the soundtrack includes New York no-wave band Suicide. Both films are oblique commentaries on the crisis, turning a knowing and sceptical eye on the Greek family unit, but also out on the wider world. But to me the most memorable feature of Dogtooth is the dance scene, an eerie, melancholy and ironic reinterpretation of Flashdance. And the Greek surprising genius in dance was very much on display at the closing night party of the Athens Biennale, as seen in the moves of biennial co-curators X&Y and team.
A visit to Athens, a city dominated by the Parthenon on the Acropolis above but in a country now ruled by an unelected, technocratic government, with default looming, may seem like to a trip to the past: to the Great Depression; fin de siècle Vienna; the ancients under the tyrants; Weimar Berlin. But of course, it is none of these: it is a visit to our future.

Text by David Adler
Source : blog.frieze.com/

Flower and Frog

2012-01-17T09:30:00.000-08:00

Frederick Sommer
Flower and Frog, 1947/48
Vintage silver print

To the Boy Elis

2012-01-17T09:16:00.000-08:00

Elis, when the blackbird calls in the black woods,
This is your decline.
Your lips drink the coolness of the blue rock-spring.

Cease, when your forehead bleeds quietly
Ancient legends
And dark interpretations of the flight of birds.

But with gentle steps you walk into the night,
That hangs full of purple grapes,
And you move the arms more beautifully in the blueness.

A thorn bush tinges,
Where your moon-like eyes are.
O, how long, Elis, have you been dead.

Your body is a hyacinth,
Into which a monk dips his waxy fingers.
Our silence is a black cavern,

From which a soft animal steps at times
And slowly lowers heavy eyelids.
On your temples black dew drips,

The last gold of expired stars.

Elis, wenn die Amsel im schwarzen Wald ruft,
Dieses ist dein Untergang.
Deine Lippen trinken die Kühle des blauen Felsenquells.

Laß, wenn deine Stirne leise blutet
Uralte Legenden
Und dunkle Deutung des Vogelflugs.

Du aber gehst mit weichen Schritten in die Nacht,
Die voll purpurner Trauben hängt
Und du regst die Arme schöner im Blau.

Ein Dornenbusch tönt,
Wo deine mondenen Augen sind.
O, wie lange bist, Elis, du verstorben.

Dein Leib ist eine Hyazinthe,
In die ein Mönch die wächsernen Finger taucht.
Eine schwarze Höhle ist unser Schweigen,

Daraus bisweilen ein sanftes Tier tritt
Und langsam die schweren Lider senkt.
Auf deine Schläfen tropft schwarzer Tau,

Das letzte Gold verfallener Sterne.

Georg Trakl, 1913

Ludwig XVI. mit Jakobinermütze

2012-01-15T16:13:00.000-08:00

Noel Lemire, „Ludwig XVI. mit Jakobinermütze", 1792
LWL - Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster / Sabine Ahlbrand-Dornseif

Learning to Handle the Modern

2012-01-15T04:20:00.000-08:00

Learning to Handle the Modern, 2012
Concrete block, plywood, acrylic

Advertising mast and press box

2012-01-14T15:21:00.001-08:00

These pictures were taken at Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm one month before. The Stockholm exhibition in the summer of 1930 manifested a new view on design and architecture known as functionalism. Pure forms, smooth surfaces, bright colors and almost flat roofs were the language of architecture as evidenced by the advertising mast on the exhibition campus. As we can see from the model, the décor could be replaced by advertising message in stringent graphic form.

Architect: Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm 1930
Scale 1 : 100

Round and round, hanging infinity

2012-01-13T16:22:00.000-08:00

Magnus Thierfelder, Round and round, hanging infinity, 2011
Elastic Gallery, Malmo, 25/11 - 28/1 2012
Source : www.magnusthierfelder.com

Topology

2012-01-13T16:14:00.000-08:00

Eyal Weizman, “Intertwined Sovereignty,” 2005

Giorgio Agamben, Eric Alliez, Étienne Balibar, Drucilla Cornell, Olafur Eliasson, Oscar Guardiola Rivera, David Harvey, Bruno Latour, Catherine Malabou, Achille Mbembe, Sandro Mezzadra, Ernesto Neto, Luiz Alberto Oliveira, Suely Rolnik, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Anton Schütz, Peter Sloterdijk, Nigel Thrift, Shiv Visvanathan, Peter Weibel, Margaret Wertheim and Thanos Zartaloudis are among the leading intellectuals, artists and writers who will be coming to Tate Modern as part of the Topology project.

Mathematicians in the first half of the twentieth century constructed Topology as a general theory of space. It initially emerged as an understanding of space in terms of properties of connectedness and invariance under transformation. Within a few years of its inception, psychologists, psychoanalysts, architects, artists, scientists and philosophers had started to use the conceptual language of relationships, intensities and transformations of this new theory outside its original field of mathematics. Limit, boundary, interior, exterior, neighbourhood, disconnection and cut were central notions that became ways of describing the fields of forces experienced by individuals. Static ideas of space as a container were replaced by understandings of movement-space, of multiplicity, differentiation and exclusive inclusion that in turn have led to new ideas of power, subjectivity, and creativity.

Topological theory has thus come to serve as a link in a network of disciplines: in each case the multiplicity of space and the formal analysis of its relations has proved illuminating. Few commentators have made explicit the nature of this topological grounding however, and in many ways these mathematical realities have been allowed to fade into the background. The Topology series of events renders explicit what has been lost sight of in this process by inviting contemporary intellectuals, artists and writers to discuss how they make use of topology in their thinking, writing and making.

Topology: Spaces of Transformation, conceived by Jean Matthee, is a major series of keynote conversations with leading intellectuals, artists and writers on the stakes and implications of topology on thinking, writing, making and acting in the world. How are the new topological spaces of globalisation open to intervention and creativity?

Topology: Embodying Transformation is a performance programme that explores auditory geometry by spatialising sound and sonifying space and where dancers perform abstract mathematical ideas. Devised by Julian Henriques, Goldsmiths, University of London, and Brian Rotman, Ohio State University as part of the Topology events at Tate Modern.

Topology: Secrets of Space is a series of seminars led by Bernard Burgoyne that investigates the construction of spatial attributes appealed to by the cultural and political theories discussed in the Starr Auditorium during the Topology series.

Curated by Jean Matthee with Bernard Burgoyne, Marko Daniel, Julian Henriques, Celia Lury and Brian Rotman.

Tate Modern
5 November 2011–16 June 2012

I Burattini

2012-01-06T12:14:00.001-08:00

British Puppet theatre (Punch and Judy style), c. 1770
Engraving, 38,5 x 29,5 cm. Francesco Maggiotto inv., Giovanni Volpato sculp. apud Nic. Cavalli Venetiis.

Man and His Organism

2012-01-06T11:58:00.000-08:00

i
Man is but a perambulating tool-box and workshop, or office, fashioned for itself by a piece of very clever slime, as the result of long experience; and truth is but its own most enlarged, general and enduring sense of the coming togetherness or convenience of the various conventional arrangements which, for some reason or other, it has been led to sanction. Hence we speak of man’s body as his “trunk.”
ii
The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan and the whole fixed upon stilts.
iii
A man should see himself as a kind of tool-box; this is simple enough; the difficulty is that it is the tools themselves that make and work the tools. The skill which now guides our organs and us in arts and inventions was at one time exercised upon the invention of these very organs themselves. Tentative bankruptcy acts afford good illustrations of the manner in which organisms have been developed. The ligaments which bind the tendons of our feet or the valves of our blood vessels are the ingenious enterprises of individual cells who saw a want, felt that they could supply it, and have thus won themselves a position among the old aristocracy of the body politic.
The most incorporate tool - as an eye or a tooth or the fist, when a blow is struck with it - has still something of the non-ego about it; and in like manner such a tool as a locomotive engine, apparently entirely separated from the body, must still from time to time, as it were, kiss the soil of the human body and be handled, and thus become incorporate with man, if it is to remain in working order.

Samuel Butler, The Note-Books,1912

Proposal for a Monument ready to Collapse

2011-12-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

Proposal for a Monument ready to Collapse (Welfare State) , 2011
Wood, plywood, acrylic
30 cm x 24 x 20 cm

White melancholia, Mourning the loss of "Good old Sweden"

2011-12-30T13:26:00.001-08:00

Sweden's post-war image as frontrunner of egalitarianism and antiracism contains more than a trace of national and racial chauvinism, argue two whiteness studies scholars. As myths of the better Sweden fade, both Right and Left are consumed by "white melancholy".

Sweden's 2010 election brought the racist Sweden Democrats into the national parliament for this first time. Post-election discussions and analyses have tended to explain the presence of a racist party in the Swedish parliament as a reflection of dissatisfaction among certain voter segments, without taking into account any analysis of issues of race and whiteness. At the same time, there has been an eruption of official antiracism among the elites and within the Swedish establishment.

However, a critical analysis of post-election Sweden in terms of race and whiteness has not been heard. Why not? How are we to understand the fact that whiteness and white privileges are maintained in a country ruled by progressive social policies, democratisation projects, gender equality and official antiracism?

We argue that Sweden is currently undergoing a double crisis of Swedish whiteness. "old Sweden", i.e. Sweden as a homogeneous society, and "good Sweden", i.e. Sweden as a progressive society, are both perceived to be threatened by the presence of non-white migrants and their descendants. Both the reactionary and racist camp and the progressive and antiracist camp are mourning the loss of this double-edged Swedish whiteness.

We also argue that our analysis of Swedish whiteness is also applicable to the situations in neighbouring Scandinavian countries, particularly to Norway after the Utøya massacre, which has prompted similar reactions to those in Sweden after the 2010 election.

The foundations of Swedish whiteness
In contemporary Sweden, the idea of being white constitutes the central core and master signifier of Swedishness, and thus of being Swedish. A Swede is a white person and a non-white person is not a Swede. In other words, within the Swedish national imaginary the difference between the genetic concept of race and the cultural concept of ethnicity has collapsed completely: whiteness is Swedishness and Swedishness is whiteness.

The conflation of race and ethnicity and the equivalence of Swedishness with whiteness is not only encountered by non-white migrants and their descendants, but also by adopted and mixed Swedes of colour with South American, African or Asian backgrounds. In spite of being more or less fully embedded within Swedishness on an ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural level, these people experience racializing practices as a result of their "non-Swedish" bodies.[1]

The historical construction of Swedishness can be traced to the pre-eminence of the Swedes, along with the Norwegians and Danes, in the construction of the white race as the elite of homo sapiens. In a scientific discourse hegemonic for almost 200 years, the Swedes and other Scandinavians were considered the most physically and aesthetically perfect people on earth.[2]

The nation's scholars excelled in and contributed substantially to racial science: Carl Linnaeus created the first modern scientific system for race classification in the mid-1700s; Anders Retzius invented the skull or cephalic index – which became the principal method for racial science itself – in the 1850s; and the Swedish government founded the Swedish Institute for Racial Biology in 1922.[3] In the mid 1930s, Sweden also installed one of the most effective sterilization programs ever, a eugenicist project that was both racialized, heteronormative, gendered and classed, and that affected more than 60 000 Swedes before being dissolved in the mid-1970s.[4]

However from the 1960s and 1970s, Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries arguably became the leading (western) voice and (white) supporter of decolonisation and anti-colonial, anti-segregation and anti-apartheid movements. In the process, the world's most radical proponent of social justice and gender equality transformed racism into a non-Swedish issue.

In a feat of national branding, "good Sweden" was promoted as more tolerant and liberal than any other (western) country and (white) people in the world. One result was, for example, that Swedes have adopted proportionally the most children of colour from former colonies than any other western country; or that Swedes have entered into interracial marriages and relationships more frequently than other western nations. Sweden imagined itself as a non-racist and post-racial utopia with no colonial past.

Swedish concepts of whiteness have developed since Sweden became a country of immigration. In everyday life, in the public sphere and in political discourse, people belonging to the 8 per cent of the total population with origins in a non-European, postcolonial or "Third World" country in Asia, Africa or South America are categorized as "immigrants", "foreigners" and "non-Swedes", and often as non-Christian or at least non-Lutheran.

Immigrants from non-western countries began to arrive in Sweden and Scandinavia in small numbers in the 1950s, and then in larger numbers in the second half of the 1970s and particularly the 1980s and onwards, when refugee immigration took over from labour immigration. Not coincidentally, this is also when integration started to be described as a "failed" project. Since the 1990s, non-white and non-Christian immigrants have dominated immigration to Sweden.

When it comes to the discrimination of migrants and their descendants, particularly non-white and non-European groups, Sweden barely differs from any other western country today. Particularly when it comes to housing, Sweden stands out for its highly racialized patterns of residential segregation.

Against this historical background, notions of Swedish whiteness evolved alongside the image of Sweden developed during the Cold War, decolonization and the social revolution of 1968: that of Sweden as paradise on earth and utopia for human rights, democracy, gender equality and antiracism, where race as concept and as category has been rendered irrelevant and obsolete.
The expanding boundaries of whiteness
Whiteness is a pivotal concept for analysing the recent Swedish election. Swedish whiteness includes racists as well as antiracists, and ultimately all Swedes, regardless of political views. Swedish whiteness is similar to the hegemonic whiteness that Matthew Hughey analyses in his interviews with white antiracists and white racists in the US, which reveal, beyond ideological statements, many similarities in terms of white perspectives and privileges.[5]

When it comes to the construction and maintenance of Swedish whiteness, complicity exists on all sides, even that of migrants who believe in the image of Sweden as the most egalitarian and antiracist country in the world. Then there are the numerous non-Swedes who desire and seek (white) Swedes as partners and friends, purely because they are (white) Swedes and therefore the most beautiful and genetically valuable people on earth – according to the Nordic racial myth.

Third World solidarity and antiracism has, in other words, gone hand in hand with white superiority and white homogeneity. It is this dual image of Sweden as an homogenous and white society that the Sweden Democrats mourn the loss of, and their response is to produce hatred towards migrants of colour. Meanwhile, it is the passing of the image of Sweden as an egalitarian and progressive society so dear to white antiracists that has provoked such a strong reaction among the Swedish elites after the election.

Central to this analysis is an understanding of whiteness as a category that constantly expands.[6] The boundaries of whiteness have always been reconstructed to include new members: for example Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans in the US. In the recent Swedish election, the expansion of the boundaries of whiteness blurred class differences, enabling the inclusion of white people from a range of class and cultural backgrounds to congregate around the notion of Swedish whiteness regardless of national origin. David Roediger has called this process "the wages of whiteness", referring to "compensation" of white US workers for their economic subordination with the public and psychological wage of being considered white and therefore "American".[7]

This means that race and racism are not merely the effect of class inequality, something that would necessarily disappear in a classless society. The expansion of the boundaries of whiteness helps explain the class-crossing practices found among the Sweden Democrats' voters, as well as among far-right voters in the other Scandinavian countries. Many Sweden Democrats are migrants or descendants of migrants from white, western, Christian countries, or of non-white mixed and adopted Swedes, who also may identify with being Swedish in order to be able to gain "the wages of whiteness".
Gender equality and whiteness
A central aspect of the construction of "good Sweden" has to do with the generous welfare state and achievements in gender equality. Along with other Scandinavian countries, Sweden has been regarded as exceptionally "woman-friendly" and ranked among the most gender-equal societies in the world. This ideal has been exported to other (Third World) countries through international development aid. However, the institutionalised gender equality discourse carries with it a sense of national identity that is intimately intertwined with whiteness and racial hierarchies, and that excludes migrants as Others.[8]

In order to maintain the supposedly uniquely Swedish construct of gender equality, non-whites are depicted as the "gender non-equal", in conjunction with a discourse of the "oppression of the Other". For Swedish white gender equality to exist, some-body is needed that is not Swedish, gender-equal and white.[9] This might explain why two of Scandinavia's far-rightwing leaders are women, and why the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik was obsessed by gender and sexual issues.

Gender equality, in its ideal form, is represented by the white heterosexual family. In Patricia Hill Collins' analysis, the white family model is a site where notions of first- and second-class citizenship, territory, "home", blood-ties, race, and nation are naturalized.[10] The white heterosexual family ideal is upheld by segregation, discrimination, racialized nationalism and anti-immigration policies. This implies that feminists should remain sceptical towards the Swedish ideal associated with the construction of the gender equal family, since it builds upon and reproduces the social, discursive and geographical relegation of the "Others", often acted out as racialized integration through subordinating practices.
White mourning and melancholia
The normalized and naturalized hierarchies surrounding Swedishness and the double-binding power of Swedish whiteness through the mourning of the loss of "old Sweden" and "good Sweden" may explain the hysterical post-election anger among "progressives" about the "reactionaries'" electoral success. During the election campaign, the Sweden Democrats rallied under the slogan Ge oss Sverige tillbaka ("Give us Sweden back"), a slogan that appealed to both sides. It may also explain why the antiracist movement in Sweden and Scandinavia is so heavily dominated by white Swedes, in contrast to North America and the UK, where the antiracist movement is to a large degree composed of representatives of the minorities themselves. It may also explain why white Swedish feminists who identify with what has been called hegemonic feminism sometimes ally themselves with racist ideologies.[11]

The Sweden Democrats' longing for "old Sweden" is expressed as a wish to return to a time when there were no ethno-racial conflicts and no non-western "patriarchal excesses". For white antiracists, on the other hand, what is under threat is the image of Sweden as an antiracist and feminist country. Ultimately, these self-images are felt to be threatened by the presence of non-western migrants.

The fact of having held the title of the world's most progressive and left-liberal country, combined with Sweden's perception of itself as the most racially homogenous and pure of all white nations, forms a double bind that makes it almost impossible to transform Swedishness into something that will also accept people of colour. When the object of love – i.e. antiracist Sweden and ethnically homogenous Sweden – is besieged or threatened with distnction, there is nothing left but an unspeakable melancholia filled with limitless pain.

The notion of "lost Sweden" also excludes people who did not live in the country during the period being mourned, or people without biological ties to the "founders" of the ethos of solidarity. Thus, directly and indirectly, the image of left-liberal, antiracist and egalitarian Sweden is constructed around the image of a past in which diversity did not exist. In other words, the recent election took place at a time when Sweden is wracked by white mourning and melancholia. Nostalgia for a white past constructed around the welfare state and the longing for a homogenous future in which hybridity has been erased is the common feature of white melancholia, which has also made itself heard in the debate following the Utøya massacre in Norway.

White melancholia, so painful to bear yet unspeakable, is a psychic state, a structure of connection to the nation, common to Swedes as well as to the image of Sweden in the world. It is as much about the humiliating decline of Sweden as frontrunner of egalitarianism, humanitarianism and antiracism as about the mourning of the passing of the Swedish population as the whitest of all white peoples.

Any future attempt to disentangle Swedishness and whiteness will have to be able to deconstruct a Swedishness that bars non-whites and traps white Swedes through the double-edged images of "old Sweden" and "good Sweden". The hope is that a transformative moment will come about that allows the mourning for "old Sweden" and "good Sweden" to project itself towards a more constructive understanding of Swedishness.

However in order to be able to accomplish this transformation, it is necessary to acknowledge the fact that the object of love is irretrievably and irrevocably lost, how painful that may be.

Text by Tobias Hübinette, Catrin Lundström

[1] Tobias Hübinette and Carina Tigervall, "To Be Non-White in a Colour-Blind Society: Conversations with Adoptees and Adoptive Parents in Sweden on Everyday Racism", Journal of Intercultural Studies 30 (2009); Catrin Lundström, "'Concrete Bodies': Young Latina Women Transgressing the Boundaries of Race and Class in White Inner-City Stockholm", Gender, Place and Culture 17 (2010); Lena Sawyer, "Routings: Race, African Diasporas, and Swedish Belonging", Transforming Anthropology 11 (2002).
[2] Maja Hagerman, Det rena landet. Om konsten att uppfinna sina förfäder [The Pure Country. On the Art of Inventing Ancestors] (Stockholm: Prisma, 2006); Katarina Schough, Hyberboré. Föreställningen om Sveriges plats i världen [Hyperbole. The Image of Sweden's Place in the World] (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2008).
[3] Gunnar Broberg, Statlig rasforskning. En historik över Rasbiologiska institutet [State-Run Race Science. A History of the Institute for Race Biology] (Stockholm: Natur & kultur, 1995).
[4] Mattias Tydén, Från politik till praktik. De svenska steriliseringslagarna 1935-1975 [From Policy to Practice. The Swedish Sterilization Laws 1935-1975] (Stockholm: Fritzes, 2000).
[5] Matthew W. Hughey, "The (Dis)similarities of White Racial Identities: The Conceptual Framework of 'Hegemonic Whiteness'", Ethnic and Racial Studies 33 (2010).
[6] France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, "The Future of Whiteness: A Map of the 'Third Wave'", Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (2009); Jonathan Warren and France Winddance Twine, "White Americans, the New Minority? Non-Blacks and the Ever-Expanding Boundaries of Whiteness", Journal of Black Studies 28 (1997).
[7] David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
[8] Suvi Keskinen, Salla Tuori, Sari Irni, and Diana Mulinari, eds., Complying with Colonialism. Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Paulina de los Reyes and Diana Mulinari, Intersektionalitet. Kritiska reflektioner över (o)jämlikhetens landskap [Intersectionality. Critical Reflections on the Landscape of (In)equality] (Malmö: Liber, 2005).
[9] Sarah Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2004).
[10] Patricia Hill Collins, "It's All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation", Hypatia 13 (1998).
[11] Mia Liinasson, "Institutionalized Knowledge: Notes on the Processes of Inclusion and Exclusion in Gender Studies in Sweden", NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 18 (2010); de los Reyes and Mulinari, Intersektionalitet. Kritiska reflektioner över (o)jämlikhetens landskap [Intersectionality. Critical Reflections on the Landscape of (In)equality].

Source:www.eurozine.com

Nothing biblical in factory farming

2011-12-30T13:16:00.000-08:00

Something has gone badly wrong in relations between human beings and other animals, and it is not just animal welfare and animal rights organisations that say so. Large swathes of the public are troubled too.

Even people who take their lead from Genesis, from its assurance that God has granted us dominion over the beasts in order to feed ourselves, suffer nagging doubts whether factory farming and a food industry operating on an industrial scale to turn living animals into what are euphemistically called ''animal products'', are quite what God had in mind.

So it is not unreasonable that animal rights organisations are increasingly seeking to give voice to the (by definition) voiceless victims of the food industry, targeting factory farming, while not ignoring other practices - the use of animals in laboratory experiments, for example, or the trade in wild animals, or the fur trade - that might equally be condemned as cruel and inhuman.

The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the late 19th century.

Since that time we have already had one warning, loud and clear, that there is something deeply, even cosmically wrong, about using industrial methods to kill fellow creatures on an industrial scale.

In the middle of the 20th century a group of Germans had the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter - or what they preferred to call the processing - of human beings.

When, belatedly, we found out what the Nazis had been up to, we cried out in horror. ''What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle.'' we cried out. ''If we had only known beforehand.''

But our cry should more accurately have been: ''What a terrible crime, to treat living human beings like units in an industrial process.''

And our cry might have had a postscript: ''What a terrible crime, come to think of it, to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process.''

Animal protection groups work for the amelioration of the conditions under which animals spend their lives. In a longer time frame, some work towards the elimination of factory farming.

In the case of Voiceless, the animal protection group founded by the Sherman family in 2004, this is done not by direct action but by persuasion. Its persuasive efforts are directed at the vast majority of the public who know and don't know that there is something bad going on, something that stinks to high heaven. It offers such people practical options for what to do next after they have been revolted by a glimpse of the lives factory animals live and the deaths they die.

Factory farming is a new phenomenon, very new indeed in the history of animal husbandry. The good news is that, after decades of untrammelled expansion, the industry has been forced on to the defensive. The activities of organisations such as Voiceless have shifted the onus on to the industry to justify its practices; and because its practices are indefensible and unjustifiable except on narrow economic grounds, the industry is battening down its hatches and hoping the storm will blow itself out. Thus, in so far as there was a public relations war, the industry has already lost the war.

The task of animal rights organisations is to show ordinary people that there are alternatives to the animal-products industry, that these alternatives need not involve sacrifices in health and nutrition, that there is no reason why these alternatives need be costly, and furthermore that the sacrifices they are being called on to make are not really sacrifices at all - that the only sacrifices in the whole scenario are being made by non-human animals.

In this regard, children provide the brightest hope. Given half a chance, children see through the lies with which advertisers bombard them (the happy chooks that are magically transformed into succulent nuggets). It takes but one glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child into a lifelong vegetarian.

Text by J. M. Coetzee, The Sydney Morning Herland, 5 dec.2011
Source:www.smh.com.au

The 2003 Nobel Laureate for Literature J. M. Coetzee is patron of Voiceless and chairman of the judging panel of the Voiceless Writing Prize sponsored by Australian Ethical Investment. The Herald is media partner of the prize, which seeks to advance public understanding of the relationship between humans and animals.
voiceless.org.au

Christ is taught how to pray

2011-12-29T12:27:00.000-08:00

It is an iconography from Jonkoping, that represents the young Christ being taught how to pray by the holy Virgin sitting on a low bench. It is not necessary to be an architect in order to imagine that the depicted place is the interior of a palace and the bench is the kind of furniture used in the Classical Rome.The child Jesus is guided by his mother and it is surprising that even the discipline of Christianity is preceded by its own leader .

Broadsheet,Jonkoping, Sweden, 1837.

Banana House

2011-12-26T04:43:00.000-08:00

Terunobu Fujimori
Banana House Sketch,2010

Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable?

2011-12-26T04:08:00.000-08:00

I am often asked if the recent global financial crisis marks the beginning of the end of modern capitalism. It is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable replacement waiting in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to today’s dominant Anglo-American paradigm are other forms of capitalism.
Continental European capitalism, which combines generous health and social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement, and relatively equal income distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it – except sustainability. China’s Darwinian capitalism, with its fierce competition among export firms, a weak social-safety net, and widespread government intervention, is widely touted as the inevitable heir to Western capitalism, if only because of China’s huge size and consistent outsize growth rate. Yet China’s economic system is continually evolving.
Indeed, it is far from clear how far China’s political, economic, and financial structures will continue to transform themselves, and whether China will eventually morph into capitalism’s new exemplar. In any case, China is still encumbered by the usual social, economic, and financial vulnerabilities of a rapidly growing lower-income country.
Perhaps the real point is that, in the broad sweep of history, all current forms of capitalism are ultimately transitional. Modern-day capitalism has had an extraordinary run since the start of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, lifting billions of ordinary people out of abject poverty. Marxism and heavy-handed socialism have disastrous records by comparison. But, as industrialization and technological progress spread to Asia (and now to Africa), someday the struggle for subsistence will no longer be a primary imperative, and contemporary capitalism’s numerous flaws may loom larger.
First, even the leading capitalist economies have failed to price public goods such as clean air and water effectively. The failure of efforts to conclude a new global climate-change agreement is symptomatic of the paralysis.
Second, along with great wealth, capitalism has produced extraordinary levels of inequality. The growing gap is partly a simple byproduct of innovation and entrepreneurship. People do not complain about Steve Jobs’s success; his contributions are obvious. But this is not always the case: great wealth enables groups and individuals to buy political power and influence, which in turn helps to generate even more wealth. Only a few countries – Sweden, for example – have been able to curtail this vicious circle without causing growth to collapse.
A third problem is the provision and distribution of medical care, a market that fails to satisfy several of the basic requirements necessary for the price mechanism to produce economic efficiency, beginning with the difficulty that consumers have in assessing the quality of their treatment.
The problem will only get worse: health-care costs as a proportion of income are sure to rise as societies get richer and older, possibly exceeding 30% of GDP within a few decades. In health care, perhaps more than in any other market, many countries are struggling with the moral dilemma of how to maintain incentives to produce and consume efficiently without producing unacceptably large disparities in access to care.
It is ironic that modern capitalist societies engage in public campaigns to urge individuals to be more attentive to their health, while fostering an economic ecosystem that seduces many consumers into an extremely unhealthy diet. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control, 34% of Americans are obese. Clearly, conventionally measured economic growth – which implies higher consumption – cannot be an end in itself.
Fourth, today’s capitalist systems vastly undervalue the welfare of unborn generations. For most of the era since the Industrial Revolution, this has not mattered, as the continuing boon of technological advance has trumped short-sighted policies. By and large, each generation has found itself significantly better off than the last. But, with the world’s population surging above seven billion, and harbingers of resource constraints becoming ever more apparent, there is no guarantee that this trajectory can be maintained.
Financial crises are of course a fifth problem, perhaps the one that has provoked the most soul-searching of late. In the world of finance, continual technological innovation has not conspicuously reduced risks, and might well have magnified them.
In principle, none of capitalism’s problems is insurmountable, and economists have offered a variety of market-based solutions. A high global price for carbon would induce firms and individuals to internalize the cost of their polluting activities. Tax systems can be designed to provide a greater measure of redistribution of income without necessarily involving crippling distortions, by minimizing non-transparent tax expenditures and keeping marginal rates low. Effective pricing of health care, including the pricing of waiting times, could encourage a better balance between equality and efficiency. Financial systems could be better regulated, with stricter attention to excessive accumulations of debt.
Will capitalism be a victim of its own success in producing massive wealth? For now, as fashionable as the topic of capitalism’s demise might be, the possibility seems remote. Nevertheless, as pollution, financial instability, health problems, and inequality continue to grow, and as political systems remain paralyzed, capitalism’s future might not seem so secure in a few decades as it seems now.

Text by Kenneth Rogoff, 2011
Source : www.project-syndicate.org

Experiment in Faces

2011-12-24T12:42:00.000-08:00

One of a number of sculptures executed upon concrete blocks which were the structure of his Arizona home, dismantled by the estate after the death of Max Ernst. The decision was made to only restore the front artistic surface rather than the whole.

Source : www.art-conservation.org

The Colors needed Counseling

2011-12-22T14:22:00.000-08:00

Picture by Grant Snider,2011
Source:thoughtballoonhelium.blogspot.com/

The Education of a Libertarian

2011-12-22T14:09:00.000-08:00

I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today.

As a Stanford undergraduate studying philosophy in the late 1980s, I naturally was drawn to the give-and-take of debate and the desire to bring about freedom through political means. I started a student newspaper to challenge the prevailing campus orthodoxies; we scored some limited victories, most notably in undoing speech codes instituted by the university. But in a broader sense we did not achieve all that much for all the effort expended. Much of it felt like trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I; there was a lot of carnage, but we did not move the center of the debate. In hindsight, we were preaching mainly to the choir — even if this had the important side benefit of convincing the choir’s members to continue singing for the rest of their lives.

As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college. The world appears too big a place. Rather than fight the relentless indifference of the universe, many of my saner peers retreated to tending their small gardens. The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd. Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking; the smartest libertarians, by contrast, had fewer hang-ups about positive law and escaped not only to alcohol but beyond it.

As one fast-forwards to 2009, the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed. Exhibit A is a financial crisis caused by too much debt and leverage, facilitated by a government that insured against all sorts of moral hazards — and we know that the response to this crisis involves way more debt and leverage, and way more government. Those who have argued for free markets have been screaming into a hurricane. The events of recent months shatter any remaining hopes of politically minded libertarians. For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand.

Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”

The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom. Let me briefly speak to three such technological frontiers:

(1) Cyberspace. As an entrepreneur and investor, I have focused my efforts on the Internet. In the late 1990s, the founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were. In the 2000s, companies like Facebook create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states. By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order. The limitation of the Internet is that these new worlds are virtual and that any escape may be more imaginary than real. The open question, which will not be resolved for many years, centers on which of these accounts of the Internet proves true.

(2) Outer space. Because the vast reaches of outer space represent a limitless frontier, they also represent a limitless possibility for escape from world politics. But the final frontier still has a barrier to entry: Rocket technologies have seen only modest advances since the 1960s, so that outer space still remains almost impossibly far away. We must redouble the efforts to commercialize space, but we also must be realistic about the time horizons involved. The libertarian future of classic science fiction, à la Heinlein, will not happen before the second half of the 21st century.

(3) Seasteading. Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans. To my mind, the questions about whether people will live there (answer: enough will) are secondary to the questions about whether seasteading technology is imminent. From my vantage point, the technology involved is more tentative than the Internet, but much more realistic than space travel. We may have reached the stage at which it is economically feasible, or where it soon will be feasible. It is a realistic risk, and for this reason I eagerly support this initiative.

The future of technology is not pre-determined, and we must resist the temptation of technological utopianism — the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own, that it will guarantee a more free future, and therefore that we can ignore the terrible arc of the political in our world.

A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

For this reason, all of us must wish Patri Friedman the very best in his extraordinary experiment.

Text by Peter Thiel
April 13th, 2009.
Source : www.cato-unbound.org

Carpenter Dreams the Countryside

2011-12-12T09:55:00.000-08:00

Carpenter Dreams the Countryside, 2011
Wood, plywood, Acrylic.

Honduras shrugged

2011-12-11T17:03:00.000-08:00

Two start-ups want to try out libertarian ideas in the country’s new special development regions

DISGUSTED by an increasingly invasive state, America’s most capable entrepreneurs retreat to Galt’s Gulch, a libertarian commune. That was the theme of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged”, a sacred text for libertarians ever since it was published in 1957. Actually creating such an enclave has been the dream of many fans of small government (or of none at all). Several have had a try at it, but their efforts have always ended in disaster .

Now, for the first time, libertarians have a real chance to implement their ideas. In addition to a big special development region, the Honduran government intends to approve two smaller zones. And two libertarian-leaning start-ups have already signed a preliminary memorandum of understanding with the Honduran government to develop them.

One firm goes by the name of Future Cities Development Corporation. It was co-founded by Patri Friedman, a grandson of Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate in economics, and until recently executive director of the Seasteading Institute, a group producing research on how to build ocean-based communes. The other is called Grupo Ciudades Libres (Free Cities Group) and is the brainchild of Michael Strong and Kevin Lyons, two entrepreneurs and libertarian activists.

Both share a purpose: to build “free cities”. Last April all three spoke at a conference organised by Universidad Francisco Marroquín, a libertarian outfit in Guatemala. In September they and Giancarlo Ibárgüen, the university’s president, launched the Free Cities Institute, a think-tank, to foster the cause.

As so often with enthusiasts, divisions within the cause run deep. The two firms hail from different parts of the libertarian spectrum. Mr Friedman is an outspoken critic of democracy. It is “ill-suited for a libertarian state”, he wrote in an essay in 2009—because it is “rigged against libertarians” (they would always lose) and inefficient. Rather than giving its citizens a voice, he argues, they should be free to exit; cities should compete for them by offering the best services.

The second firm’s backers appear to be less radical. A founder of several charter schools, Mr Strong is now the force behind FLOW, a movement that claims to combine libertarian thinking “with love, compassion, social and environmental consciousness”, says its website. He too prefers exit over voice (meaning that he thinks that leaving and joining are better constraints on executive power than the ballot box). But he also believes that democratic consent is needed in certain areas, such as criminal justice. His goal in Honduras is less to implement libertarian ideals than to reduce poverty and to speed up economic development.

Some in the Honduran government have libertarian leanings, which is one reason why the authorities have moved so quickly. But when the master developers for the new zones are selected next year, strong political credentials will not be enough—and may even prove to be a drawback. Mr Friedman is stressing a difference between his political beliefs and his firm. “Ideology makes bad business,” he says, adding that Future Cities Development wants to focus on the needs of the people who live in the city.

Yet the biggest hurdle for the libertarian start-ups may be that the transparency commission, which will oversee the development regions, is unlikely to give them free rein. The “constitutional statute” for the development zones, which the Honduran national congress passed in August, does not leave much wiggle room in key areas, not least when it comes to democracy: ultimately their citizens will vote.

Both firms, however, have links to prominent libertarians with deep pockets. Mr Strong is close to John Mackey, the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket chain—though Mr Strong says that Mr Mackey already has too many other things on his plate. Mr Friedman’s contacts seem more promising: the Seasteading Institute received lots of cash from Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who founded the internet payment service PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, the world’s biggest social network.

Mr Thiel’s ambitions go far beyond scouting out the next big thing in technology. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in an essay in 2009. This is why libertarians should find an escape from politics, he added. “Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode of escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.” Back then he had the ocean or space in mind. Honduras would certainly be more convenient.

Source : economist.com, 10 Dec, 2011

Insomnia. Homer. The rows of stretched sails

2011-12-08T14:41:00.000-08:00

Insomnia. Homer. The rows of stretched sails.
I’ve read the catalogue of ships just to the middle:
That endless caravan, that lengthy stream of cranes,
Which long ago rose up above the land oh Hellas.

It’s like a wedge of cranes towards the distant shores –
The foreheads of the kings crowned with the foam of Gods.
Where are you sailing to? If Helen were not there,
What Troy would be to you, oh warriors of Achaea

The sea and Homer – everything is moved by love.
Whom shall I listen to? There is no sound from Homer,
And full of eloquence the black sea roars and roars,
And draws with thunderous crashing nearer to my pillow.

Osip Mandelstam,
Crimea, August 1915

Бессонница. Гомер. Тугие паруса.
Я список кораблей прочел до середины:
Сей длинный выводок, сей поезд журавлиный,
Что над Элладою когда-то поднялся.

Как журавлиный клин в чужие рубежи —
На головах царей божественная пена —
Куда плывете вы? Когда бы не Елена,
Что Троя вам одна, ахейские мужи?

И море, и Гомер — все движется любовью.
Кого же слушать мне? И вот Гомер молчит,
И море чёрное, витийствуя, шумит
И с тяжким грохотом подходит к изголовью.

О́сип Эми́льевич Мандельшта́м
Август 1915, Крым

Who Want's a Bologna Sandwich? Pippi Longstocking

2011-12-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

Who Want's a Bologna Sandwich? Pippi Longstocking

Cubist Tree

2011-12-07T10:50:00.001-08:00

Maquette for Arbre Cubiste (Cubist Tree), 1925
Jan Martel (French, 1896–1966); Joël Martel (French, 1896–1966)
Painted wood H. 31 1/2 in. (80 cm), W. 15 1/8 in. (38.4 cm), D. 15 in. (38.1 cm)

The twin brothers Joël and Jan Martel were avant-garde sculptors best known for their four concrete Cubist "trees" designed for a garden setting at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. Although the exhibition was intended to feature the best examples of contemporary decorative arts and design, most of the works shown were stylistically rooted in tradition. The small number of uncompromisingly modernist displays, including the Martel trees, was derided in the popular press of the day: one cartoon depicted a baffled gardener debating whether to water them. More than fifteen feet high, the trees were destroyed when the exhibition closed, and this maquette is the only nonphotographic record of them. Each had a cruciform trunk supporting quadrangular planes attached vertically and at angles, suggesting foliage; their abstract modern sensibility clearly derived from the polemics of Cubism.

Colored demarcation of a small garden

2011-12-07T10:36:00.000-08:00

These pictures show a colored demarcation of a small garden in a semipublic residential area somewhere in Moscow this summer, 2011.

And i feel that you expect of me a rectangular , right-angled inner life that you can set against a drafting triangle to determine: straight

2011-12-02T13:56:00.001-08:00

And i feel that you expect of me a rectangular , right-angled inner life that you can set against a drafting triangle to determine: straight
55 x 75 cm
Watercolor, acrylic and photographic print on paper

Portrait of Architects and advisors of UNESCO Headquarters

2011-12-02T13:47:00.000-08:00

Unknown photographer. Portrait of architects and advisors of UNESCO Headquarters, Paris: Eero Saarinen (1910-1916), Pier Luigi Nervi (1891-1979), Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969), Walter Gropius (1883-1969), Bernard Zehrfuss (1911-1996), Le Corbusier (1887-1965), Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), and Sven Markelius (1889-1972).
Paris, 1952

At first glance, this anonymous photograph, dated 1952, reads as an innocuous document of a typical working session of eight of the nine architects who participated in the design of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Headquarters in Paris. Upon deeper analysis, however, it reveals considerable intrigue.

Le Corbusier establishes the main visual focus. White bald pate, signature black-frame glasses, and bow-tie askew, he leans his muscular shoulders into the picture plane, engrossed with Sven Markelius in a drawing over which their pens converge on a common point of conversation. Above, pipe-smoking Bernard Zehrfuss observes the design discussion at safe distance. Marcel Breuer stands apart, disengaged. At the centre of the table, Walter Gropius sits back, silent and stoic, with eyes focused at a distant point, hardly attending to Ernesto Nathan Rogers (pipe in hand), who appears to share with him a set of notes and to occupy chairmanship of the meeting. At the far corner of the table, heads inclined, Eero Saarinen and Pier Luigi Nervi engage in a separate conversation over a scattered pile of papers. Despite appearances, the official roles of these eight men were not at all at par.

ln 1951, the UNESCO planning committee had studied the feasibility of establishing its new international headquarters in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, facing the Place de Fontenoy, on a historic north-south axis with Jacques-Ange Gabriel’s Ecole Militaire (1768-1773), Gustave Eiffel’s Universal Exposition Tower (1889), and Jacques Carlu, Louis-Hippolyte Boileau and Léon Azéma’s Palais de Chaillot (1935-1937), across the Seine. Initially, Le Corbusier had been recommended as principal architect by the Brazilian delegate Paolo Carneiro. However, U.S. State Department representative Jacobs vetoed the recommendation because of the French architect’s much publicized confrontations with Wallace Harrison during 1947-1948 over the American’s alleged artistic exploitation and inaccurate execution of Le Corbusier’s original plans for the United Nations Headquarters in New York. This scandal, and Le Corbusier’s notoriously excessive financial demands, left some American members wary of future engagements, especially as the United States was to provide principal financing for the Paris construction.

Ignoring strong interventions on Le Corbusier’s behalf by Luis Sert, President of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), on 5 November 1951, the UNESCO Committee instead named Beaux-Arts-trained Eugène Beaudouin as provisional architect, with consultants Howard Robertson of England and Eero Saarinen of the United States. The Headquarters Committee simultaneously appointed an International Panel of Advisors, presided over by Gropius, which included Rogers, Lucio Costa, Markelius, and Saarinen. Enjoined by Gropius to participate on the Advisory Committee and “to take the bitter pill,” Le Corbusier consented in February 1952. This panel unanimously rejected Beaudouin’s design proposals submitted in April.

Ignoring Gropius’ persistent promotion of Le Corbusier as sole principal architect, on 10 Jury 1952 the UNESCO Committee ultimately appointed Zehrfuss, Breuer, and Nervi as the official architect-engineer team, retaining the original Advisory Panel. The photograph must have been taken during that summer when the trio likely presented their designs to the advisors (Costa is absent) before publishing their submission on 15 September 1952. It contained a perspective of the General Secretariat Building raised on pilotis, closely resembling that drawing (barely visible) pinned up behind Zehrfuss and Breuer in the photograph. At that moment, given his visible engagement, Le Corbusier must have still believed in the potential for influence in his advisory position to move the project forward.

His belief was short-lived: his role proved nominal. Rarely was Le Corbusier solicited during the design and construction process from 1952 to 1958. Correspondence at the Foundation Le Corbusier reveals rancour and condescension toward the official team whose work he considered banal and from which he dissociated himself. In the Secretariat building, he must have recognised that the Y-shaped, concave, concrete-and-glass façade, sunscreens, and tapered pilotis, were the work of second-generation Modernists, depending largely on formulaic motifs. He had already taken more dramatic steps in his daring expressionistic works at Chandigarh, Marseille, and Ronchamp, leaving behind the UNESCO Building as a vapid reminder of his past, original achievements.

Barbara Shapiro Comte
Source: Casabella, November 1999

Atomium : 21st Century Atomic Girls

2011-12-02T07:53:00.000-08:00

Ted Benoit, a herald of the return of “clear line”, enjoys composing images that have a certain human presence. Creatively empowered by the expanded horizons of the “Atomium 1958-2008” collection, he has set the cult monument of Expo ´58 in a setting that is as futuristic as it is fascinating.

The creator of Ray Banana came to know the Atomium, through photographs, from 1958 and finally came to visit it in 1982. “It was one of the very first things that I saw on my first visit to Brussels. I even bought one or two of the souvenirs of the time, one of which was a spring-loaded thing, a little helicopter that circled the Atomium; the whole contraption had its own special round box covered in plaid.” Seeing the monument as it really was could only modify one’s perception of it. “Actually, it was great to go down through the tube-shaped struts on foot because, from the inside, it was more like something from Jules Verne than Sputnik.”

For the artist behind two magnificent Blake et Mortimer albums, the Atomium is not inextricably linked to Expo ´58. “Yes of course, and not because it has survived whereas the Expo has not, which gives it an entirely different significance. The Expo only existed in the present; the structure is also part of the past, much as is the remnant of the Statue of Liberty that Charlton Heston discovers emerging from the sands at the end of “Planet of the Apes.” That scene was one of the many starting-points of the “21st Century Atomic Girls”screenprint (along with, among others, an “anodyne” photo of two young girls visiting the Expo, the architectural form of one of the pavilions, and the statuary that was an integral part of the Expo ´58 site)". For the author of Vers la ligne claire, paying homage to the Atomium is not a difficult task, “because the dreams and illusions it symbolised are quite touching. Moreover, as the Atomium is a hollow structure, it chimes with the notion of space which itself is a very interesting concept to draw.”

It is often said that a good image cannot content itself with being merely seductive; it must recount a story or suggest its own unmistakeable melody. “That’s not something that I should explain” says Ted Benoit. “Here’s one approach: the title is a paraphrase of an old King Crimson song – I don’t like it that much, but I was very taken by the use of another track from that album in the film Le fils de l’homme by Alfonso Cuaron. What is conveyed in that film (one of the most fascinating films of recent times) strikes me as being very apt in understanding the years to come. The Atomium is the twentieth century; we are now in the twenty-first century. It helped us to understand the new era, that’s all. Why feature little girls? No idea. That’s its unmistakeable melody.”

Source:www.champaka.be

Structured Procrastination

2011-12-01T14:50:00.000-08:00

`
. . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley, in Chips off the Old Benchley, 1949

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.

Another example is book order forms. I write this in June. In October, I will teach a class on Epistemology. The book order forms are already overdue at the book store. It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.) I get almost daily reminders from the department secretary, students sometimes ask me what we will be reading, and the unfilled order form sits right in the middle of my desk, right under the wrapping from the sandwich I ate last Wednesday. This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things. But in fact, the book store is plenty busy with forms already filed by non-procrastinators. I can get mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need to order popular well-known books from efficient publishers. I will accept some other, apparently more important, task sometime between now and, say, August 1st. Then my psyche will feel comfortable about filling out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.

The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?

Text by John Perry

Source : www.structuredprocrastination.com

Advent

2011-11-29T15:31:00.000-08:00

In front of the craft shop,
a small nativity,
mother, baby, sheep
made of white
and blue balloons.

*

Sky
god
girl.

Pick out the one
that doesn’t belong.

*

Some thing

close to nothing
flat
from which,

fatherless,
everything has come.

Rae Armantrout
2009

Horizon Problem

2011-11-26T17:51:00.000-08:00

Horizon Problem, 2011
38 x 19 x 13 cm
Wood, plywood, Acrylic.

Paper Model of a Functional House

2011-11-26T17:46:00.000-08:00

Paper model of a functional house with a roof terrace made by a 14 year old girl form a pattern in "familiejournalen". The house has en antrance hal. kitchen, bathroom, living room and several bedrooms. Denmark, 1936.

"Metod" Talk

2011-11-24T13:28:00.000-08:00

Kostis Velonis’ work draws from a variety of sources like political theory, history of art and architecture and is a lengthy study and reflection upon the concept of the archive as a key tool for art and knowledge. In recent works Velonis re-examines issues of the modernist architectural tradition in relation to the radical aesthetics and theory of the avant-garde. Velonis has a three month residency at Iaspis in Malmo (October-December 2011) and his exhibition The Promise of Happiness is shown at Signal 25 November 2011-19 Februari 2012. The talk will be held in English.

Metod is a series of lectures that focuses on working methods within the field of contemporary art- and culture.

Signal Center For Contemporary Art, Malmo
Thursday 1 December 2011, 7pm

The Promise of Happiness

2011-11-23T08:35:00.001-08:00

There is something promising, something desirable about the Swedish model, especially in times of global economic crisis when the swedish economy seems to stand as unaffected and well rooted as a pine tree in the deep forests. This is of course not entirely true, but the cliché image is striking. The project of modernisation with technology, social engineering and the promise of a better life propelled the emergence of the swedish success story. However, a more nuanced analysis of the Swedish welfare state entails the complex understanding of its achievements and its drawbacks.

In The Promise of Happiness Kostis Velonis engages with the mutual relationship between social welfare and cultural modernity based on the belief that architecture and design will improve society, and that behind formal and aesthetic applications there is a plan for the production of happiness. With equal amount enthusiasm and critical investigation, he embraces the two contradictory interpretations of the welfare state – from one perspective it is understood as a democratic structure which is liberating on the individual level; from another the individual is understood as controlled and repressed by the state. Sometimes adapting the skillful language of the carpenter or the furniture designer and sometimes splurging into the amateur do it yourself-attitude Velonis' sculptural work both salute and satirize the principles of democratic design that combine politics with domesticity.

”Individual and mass... The personal or the general? Quality or quantity? - an insoluble question, because we cannot escape the fact of collectivity, just as little as we can disregard the individual's demand for autonomous life. The contemporary problem is: quantity and quality, mass and individual. It is necessary to solve this problem also in architecture and the crafts.” From the Swedish functionalist manifesto acceptera (1931).

25 November 2011 - 19 February 2012
Opening Friday 25 November at 7-9pm

Kostis Velonis holds a three month residency at Iaspis in Malmö with Signal as the host institution.

Source: www.signalsignal.org

Earth People

2011-11-22T20:58:00.000-08:00

Earth People, 2011
Slide Projection

Folkets Hus in Malmo

2011-11-22T20:50:00.000-08:00

The People's House (Folkets Hus) in Malmo, 40's-50's
(See also my post "Folkets Hus -Local Labour Centers", 11 Oct.)

Source: famgus.se

You Might be Able to Climb but Definitely you Will Fall

2011-11-22T20:33:00.000-08:00

You Might be Able to Climb but Definitely you Will Fall , 2011
100x 85 x 85 cm
Wood, plywood.

Words Words Words

2011-11-21T13:22:00.000-08:00

Leo Ferre

Et qu'ont-ils à rentrer chaque année les Artistes ?
J'avais sur le futur des mains de cordonnier
Chaussant les astres de mes peaux ensemellées
La conscience dans le spider je mets les voiles
Et quarante millions de mètres de tailleur
Prenaient la taille à la putain de Galilée
La terre a bu le coup et penche du Tropique
Elle reste agrippée à mon temps cellulaire
Je déchargeais des tombereaux de souvenirs
Nous étions une histoire et n'avions rien à dire
Moi je prendrai la quatrième dimension
Pour trisser dans l'azur mes jambes migratrices
Le mur instantané que je dresse à la Chine
Mao c'était le nom de ce Viking flamand
Le tissu d'esquimau vieillit beaucoup plus vite
Des plaies sur des grabats du Chili à Lisbonne
S'exténuaient en équations de cicatrices
Le malade concret et l'interne distrait
Sont allés boire un pot au Café de la Morgue
Des vieillards le chéquier à la main à la banque
Faisaient des virements de testicules abstraits
L'embryon vaginé derviche dans le manque
Un pavot est venu l'asperger cette nuit
Mon berceau féodal et mes couilles gothiques
Des faux-nez des trognons des tissus ajoutés
Fondaient sous les sunlights de l'Opéra Comique
La Standard Oil prend du bidon et du gin fizz
La fièvre est descendue ce soir à Mexico
O ce parfum diapré dans la nuit des cigales
Dans une discothèque on a mis des barreaux
Les fenêtres s'en vont de la gorge et du squale
Ça sent la perfection dans ces rues amputées
Saint-Denis c'est un saint au derrière doublé
La fièvre est descendue ce soir dans un bordel
Et fallait voir comment ça soufflait dans la cale
Il y a partout des cons bordés d'oiseaux
Comme des lettres cheminant en parchemin
Nightingale O chansons crevées à minuit trente
J'ai le concile dans la main qui se lamente
Devant le mur à faire un peu des oraisons
La Folie m'a tenu la main à sa culotte
On eût dit de la mer s'en allant pour de bon
Viens petit dévêts-toi prends du large et jouis
Je sais des paravents comme un zoom d'espérance

Que font-ils ? Qui sont-ils ?
Ces gens qu'on tient en laisse
Dans les ports au shopping
Au bordel à la messe ?
Et ces mômes qu'on pourrait
S'carrer entre deux trains
Histoire de leur montrer
Qu'on a du face-à-main...
Ils ont voté Ils ont voté
Comme on prend un barbiturique
Et ils ont mis la République
Au fond d'un vase à reposer
Les experts ont analysé
Ce qu'il y avait au fond du vase
Il n'y avait rien qu'un peu de vase

Et qu'ont-ils à rentrer chaque année les Artistes ?
J'avais sur le futur des mains de cordonnier
Chaussant les astres de mes peaux ensemellées
La conscience dans le spider je mets les voiles...

SHAKESPEARE AUSSI ETAIT UN TERRORISTE

" Words... words... words... " disait-il

Videla ?
En français : BUDELLE, tripes
En italien : BUDELLA, tripes

En argentin ?
Allez-y voir !

DE QUOI DEGUEULER...
VRAIMENT!

Where does such tenderness come from?

2011-11-21T13:03:00.001-08:00

Where does such tenderness come from?
These curls that I stroke with my hand
Aren’t the first that I’ve stroked, and I
Knew lips that were darker than yours.

Stars rose in the sky and faded,
Where does such tenderness come from? –
And glowing eyes also rose and faded
Right next to my own two eyes.

And I used to listen to greater hymns
In complete darkness, at night,
Betrothed - Oh, tenderness! -
On the chest of the singer himself.

Where does such tenderness come from,
And what do I do with it, you, sly,
Adolescent, vagabond singer,
Whose eyelashes couldn’t be longer?

***
Откуда такая нежность?
Не первые — эти кудри
Разглаживаю, и губы
Знавала темней твоих.

Всходили и гасли звезды,
Откуда такая нежность?—
Всходили и гасли очи
У самых моих очей.

Еще не такие гимны
Я слушала ночью темной,
Венчаемая — о нежность!—
На самой груди певца.

Откуда такая нежность,
И что с нею делать, отрок
Лукавый, певец захожий,
С ресницами — нет длинней?

Marina Tsvetaeva, 1916
Translated by Andrey Kneller

Home under Construction (The Project of Happiness)

2011-11-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

Home under Construction (The Project of Happiness), 2011
Slide projection

Accent

2011-11-19T16:04:00.000-08:00

Christian Berg belongs to a group of Swedish modern sculptors who remain influenced by functionalistic and constructive ideals but not with the usual radical frame of the Soviet and German colleagues of his time. His coolly controlled sensualism is rather conventional in the eyes of the polemical avant-garde. After a period of personal crisis, during the years preceding the war, Christian Berg he made a journey to Greece and this had a fertilizing effect upon him. He began to sculpt again, this time as a portraitist, discovering the possibilities of the classic expression beyond the fashions of the post cubist stylisations. In any case he is recognized as a pioneer of the north european sculpture and at the following pictures I choose one model and a drawing which I really like it. Both the two works have been realised for specific purposes.

'Accent", Proposal for a monument for the unknown political prisoner, bronze,1952.

Cover for the publication of Sigfrid Siwertz, "The Big Project", Stockholm, 1930.

Sabottage

2011-11-17T11:55:00.001-08:00

Albert Jensen, Sabottage : Rδttegεngen i Karlskrona
Sveriges ungsocialistiska parti, Rδttsfall, 1909.

One Side gets even Lonelier

2011-11-17T11:37:00.000-08:00

Untitled (After "the Melancholy of the distance") 2011
Wood, acrylic, mirror, wool.

Old Marx

2011-11-15T08:46:00.000-08:00

I try to envision his last winter,
London, cold and damp, the snow’s curt kisses
on empty streets, the Thames’ black water.
Chilled prostitutes lit bonfires in the park.
Vast locomotives sobbed somewhere in the night.
The workers spoke so quickly in the pub
that he couldn’t catch a single word.
Perhaps Europe was richer and at peace,
but the Belgians still tormented the Congo.
And Russia? Its tyranny? Siberia?

He spent evenings staring at the shutters.
He couldn’t concentrate, rewrote old work,
reread young Marx for days on end,
and secretly admired that ambitious author.
He still had faith in his fantastic vision,
but in moments of doubt
he worried that he’d given the world only
a new version of despair;
then he’d close his eyes and see nothing
but the scarlet darkness of his lids.

Adam Zagajewski January 21, 2008
Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh.

Charles Schulz’s self portrait

2011-11-13T13:49:00.000-08:00

Charles Schulz’s self portrait :: scanned from The Peanuts Collection :: Little, Brown and Company :: 2010

Source: http://heyoscarwilde.tumblr.com

Setting the Scene

2011-11-09T10:38:00.001-08:00

A rather similar way of protection (see Occupy Copenhagen protesters, "Trees don't Grow on money" post) of the "rebellion" equipment around Zuccotti Park, renamed Liberty Square by the occupation, at the end of October.The tents are still up, and the songs are still singing.Occupy Wall Street, NYC,2011.

Rettet die Würde der Demokratie

2011-11-08T16:31:00.000-08:00

Man muss die aufsehenerregenden Interventionen des Herausgebers nicht immer goutieren, um dringend zu wünschen, dass die Wirkung seines jüngsten Artikels zugunsten einer „verramschten“ Demokratie nicht mit dem schnellen Szenenwechsel verpufft. Seine Interpretation der kopflosen Reaktionen unserer politischen Eliten auf die Absicht Papandreous, das griechische Volk über die trostlose Alternative zwischen Pest und Cholera selbst entscheiden zu lassen, trifft ins Schwarze. Was hätte die dramatische Lage einer von „den Märkten“ kujonierten politischen Klasse besser entlarven können als die pompöse Aufregung des Chefpersonals von EU und Internationalem Währungsfond über den unbotmäßigen Kollegen aus Athen?

Die Hauptdarsteller auf der Bühne der EU- und Euro-Krise, die seit 2008 an den Drähten der Finanzindustrie zappeln, plustern sich empört gegen einen Mitspieler auf, der es wagt, den Schleier über dem Marionettencharakter ihrer Muskelspiele zu lüften. Inzwischen ist der Gemaßregelte eingeknickt. Über dieser Wendung sollten wir nicht vergessen, was aus dem Schauspiel zu lernen ist. Ist es wirklich der glückliche Sieg des Sachverstandes über den befürchteten Unverstand des Volkes oder eines Spielers, der sich zum Anwalt des Volkes aufwirft?

Papandreou hat das Vorhaben eines Referendums aufgegeben, als sich sein Finanzminister vor dem Morgengrauen in einen Brutus verwandelte. Am Nachmittag desselben Tages konnte Reuters vermelden, dass der Euro „angesichts des bevorstehenden Kollapses der Regierung“ deutlich zugelegt hatte und die Aktien-Indices an den europäischen Börsen gestiegen waren. Erst die Peripetie, Papandreous Kehrtwende, enthüllt den zynischen Sinn dieses griechischen Dramas – weniger Demokratie ist besser für die Märkte. Mit Recht diagnostiziert Frank Schirrmacher in dieser Affäre die Abkehr von den europäischen Idealen.

Ob Papandreou die Vertrauensabstimmung übersteht oder nicht – zurück bleibt eine Gestalt im Zwielicht. Inzwischen wird seine Äußerung kolportiert, das Referendum sei „nie Selbstzweck“ gewesen. Zurück bleibt ein Vexierbild, das sowohl den tragischem Helden wie den Machtopportunisten zeigt. Es sollte nicht verwundern, wenn die Person selbst beides in einem wäre – sie verkörperte dann den Typus des Politikers, der am Spagat zwischen den Welten der Finanzexperten und der Bürger scheitert. Heute sind die politischen Eliten einer Zerreißprobe ausgesetzt. Beide driften auseinander – die Systemimperative des verwilderten Finanzkapitalismus, den die Politiker selbst erst von der Leine der Realökonomie entbunden haben, und die Klagen über das uneingelöste Versprechen sozialer Gerechtigkeit, die ihnen aus den zerberstenden Lebenswelten ihrer demokratischen Wählerschaft entgegenschallen.
Beruhigungspillen liegen griffbereit

Gewiss, in liberal verfassten Steuerstaaten hat immer ein Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Demokratie und Kapitalismus bestanden. Demokratisch gewählte Regierungen können sich Legitimation nur dadurch erwerben und erhalten, dass sie clever die Wege aufspüren, auf denen die Imperative beider Seiten irgendwie zum Ausgleich gebracht werden können – die Gewinnerwartungen der Investoren und die Erwartungen der Wähler, die wollen, dass es im Hinblick auf Lebensstandard, Einkommensverteilung und sozialer Sicherheit halbwegs gerecht zugeht. Aber Krisenzeiten zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass solche Wege blockiert sind. Dann müssen die Politiker Farbe bekennen.

Natürlich liegen ideologische Beruhigungspillen, die die Vorstellung hervorrufen, das kurzfristige Wohl der Banken und der Shareholders sei eins mit den langfristigen Interessen der Bürger und der Stakeholders, immer griffbereit. Aber heute dürfte sich kein verantwortlicher Politiker mehr etwas vormachen. Die Politiker, die die Bankenkrise den überschuldeten Staaten in die Schuhe schieben und dem ganzen Europa ohne Rücksicht auf Verluste Sparprogramme aufnötigen, sehen nur auf einem Auge. Sie erkennen, dass der Mechanismus der öffentlichen Kreditaufnahme an seine Grenzen gestoßen ist, aber sie fragen nicht nach den Gründen für den Legitimationsbedarf, den der Gesetzgeber auf diese Weise befriedigt hat.

Der legitime Anspruch, dass es in den europäischen Wohlstandsgesellschaften neben dem privaten Reichtum keine öffentliche Armut und keine marginalisierte Armutsbevölkerung geben darf, wird ja nicht schon dadurch entwertet, dass der Überhang des liquiden Kapitals nach Anlagemöglichkeiten sucht und irgendwann auf Kosten der Bürger „abgeschöpft“ werden muss. Man möchte den Politikern, die sich in die heile ordoliberale Welt einer richtig eingestellten, aber unpolitisch sich selbst regulierenden Wirtschaftsgesellschaft zurückträumen, die Lektüre eines Aufsatzes von Wolfgang Streeck in der letzten Nummer der „New Left Review“ empfehlen. Dort untersucht der Direktor des sozialwissenschaftlichen Max-Planck-Instituts in Köln, warum der Schuldenmechanismus, der heute unerträgliche Kosten verursacht, seit den achtziger Jahren den damals in ähnlicher Weise untragbar gewordenen Inflationsmechanismus abgelöst hat.
Der drastische Schamfleck

Papandreou hat das Verdienst, den zentralen Konflikt, der sich heute in die ungreifbaren Arkanverhandlungen zwischen Euro-Staaten und Banklobbyisten verschoben hat, für eine Schrecksekunde ins Licht jener Arena zurückgeholt zu haben, wo aus Betroffenen Beteiligte werden können. Gerade wenn nur die Wahl zwischen Pest und Cholera besteht, darf die Entscheidung nicht über die Köpfe einer demokratischen Bevölkerung hinweg getroffen werden. Das ist nicht nur eine Frage der Demokratie, hier steht die Würde auf dem Spiel. Ein Kommentator der „Financial Times“, die sonst mit den Idolen der Hochfinanz nicht zimperlich umgeht, vertrat nach Bekanntwerden des Referendumsvorhabens die pikante Meinung, eine Entscheidung politischer Natur sei eher Sache des Parlaments, während ein Referendum nur im Falle einer Verfassungsänderung angebracht sei. Hätte nicht die griechische Bevölkerung wenigstens nachträglich über den verfassungsändernden Souveränitätsverlust abstimmen sollen, der, wie auch in Irland und Portugal, mit den Auflagen der Troika aus EU, Weltwährungsfonds und Europäischer Zentralbank längst eingetreten war?

Lehrreich ist Papandreou aber nicht nur in der Rolle des tragischen Helden. Als der Machttaktiker, der den politisch-kriminellen Machenschaften einer gewissenlosen Opposition das Wasser abgraben wollte, hat er, kaum eine Woche nach der vermeintlich großen Lösung, die Unberechenbarkeit einer zerrissenen Europäischen Union bloßgestellt. Man muss nicht sogleich von Unregierbarkeit reden; aber drastischer hätte der Schamfleck einer Währungsgemeinschaft ohne Politische Union, die fehlende supranationale Handlungsfähigkeit nicht ausgeleuchtet werden können.

Die bailouts, die sich überschlagen, haben bestenfalls aufschiebende Wirkung. Eine überzeugende Lösung der Finanzkrise ist mit Mitteln der Fiskalpolitik allein gar nicht zu haben; überzeugen könnte die europäische Politik nur mit dem glaubhaften institutionellen Entwurf zu einer abgestuften Integration. Langfristig scheint die gegenwärtige Krise ohnehin keinen anderen Ausweg zu lassen als die überfällige Regulierung der Banken und der Finanzmärkte. Den reuevollen Absichtserklärungen der G-20 auf ihrem ersten Treffen im Jahre 2008 in London sind keine Taten gefolgt.
Für eine europäische Verfassungsgebung

Es fehlt am politischen Willen zur globalen Einigung, weil die Institutionen fehlen, die eine supranationale Willensbildung und die globale Durchsetzung von Beschlüssen erst ermöglichen würden. Auch aus diesem Grunde müssten die Staaten der Europäischen Währungsgemeinschaft die Krise als Chance begreifen und mit der Absicht, ihre politische Handlungsfähigkeit auf supranationaler Ebene zu verstärken, Ernst machen. Das griechische Desaster ist jedoch eine deutliche Warnung vor dem postdemokratischen Weg, den Merkel und Sarkozy eingeschlagen haben. Eine Konzentration der Macht bei einem intergouvernementalen Ausschuss der Regierungschefs, die ihre Vereinbarungen den nationalen Parlamenten aufs Auge drücken, ist der falsche Weg. Ein demokratisches Europa, das keineswegs die Gestalt eines europäischen Bundesstaates annehmen muss, muss anders aussehen.

Dieses Projekt verlangt nicht nur institutionelle Phantasie. Die überfällige Kontroverse über Notwendigkeit und Nutzen eines solchen Projekts muss in der breiten Öffentlichkeit ausgetragen werden. Das verlangt allerdings von den politischen Eliten nicht nur den üblichen Spagat zwischen Bürgerinteressen und dem Rat der Experten. Die erneute Anbahnung eines verfassungsgebenden Prozesses würde vielmehr ein Engagement verlangen, das von den Routinen des Machtopportunismus abweicht und Risiken eingeht. Dieses Mal müssten die Politiker in der ersten Person sprechen, um die Bürger zu überzeugen.

Der Politik und Parteipolitik wäre eine solche Initiative gar nicht mehr zuzumuten, wenn sie sich tatsächlich zu einem selbstbezüglichen System geschlossen und gegenüber der Umwelt einer nur noch administrativ als Stimmenreservoir wahrgenommenen politischen Öffentlichkeit abgekapselt hätten. Dann könnten sich die Parameter für das, was in der Öffentlichkeit als selbstverständlich gilt, nur noch im Zuge einer sozialen Bewegung verschieben. Wer die überregionale Presse in Amerika verfolgt hat, wird über die Reaktionen erstaunt sein, die „Occupy Wall Street“ ausgelöst hat.

Von Jürgen Habermas

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 04,11.2011
Source: http://www.faz.net

Trees Don't Grow on Money

2011-11-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

The Occupy Wall street movement has not been a popular option for demonstrations in Denmark as it's been in United States and other European Nations. In the central square of the Copenhagen, a small group of people have however realized the conditions for a kind of public presentation using creative and crafty ways about the protection of their equipment. Here are some shots from a recent travel to the capital city of Danes. November 2011.

The Grand Domestic Revolution – User's Manual

2011-11-08T03:01:00.000-08:00

Revolution' is no longer just a notion from a bygone era that is periodically resuscitated as a fashion buzzword or in celebration of some technological innovation. The current crisis makes it abundantly clear that the triumph of neoliberalism has not guaranteed a better life for the majority of citizens and non-citizens. Living means struggling with perpetually rising housing rents and mortgage pressure, with the consequences of having work or no work, and anxieties arising from exploitation and self-exploitation. Living is flailing under the constant demand for individualised performance. Living means being locked up in our homes and workplaces, connected mainly through the Internet. Our lives have been distanced from families, friends, colleagues, neighbours and strangers. We want to change this—and that change has to be more than cosmetic.

'The Grand Domestic Revolution—User's Manual' (GDR) is our proposal for taking action and amending our precarious living conditions right here and now, starting from our homes, neighbourhoods and work places, to our towns, cities and beyond. After two years of 'living research' residencies, home productions, town meetings and affinity actions, GDR culminates in an exhibition that aims to share proposals for a grand domestic revolution today. We ask you to join us in our investigation of the conditions and status of the contemporary domestic sphere and in exploring ways of transforming it—building new forms of living and working in common.

Long Live The Grand Domestic Revolution!

The exhibition includes works by:

Agency, Ask! (Actie Schone Kunsten) with Andreas Siekmann, Sepake Angiama & Sam Causer, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Doris Denekamp & Arend Groosman, Domestic Workers Netherlands (part of FNV Bondgenoten) with Matthijs de Bruijne, Paul Elliman with Na Kim, Hans van Lunteren and Rob van de Steen, Casco-HKU Creative Lab 'Extended Family', Andrea Francke, 'Our Autonomous Life' with Nazima Kadir, Maria Pask and evolving cooperative cast, Shiu Jin, Mary Kelly with Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt, kleines postfordistisches Drama, Germaine Koh, Graziela Kunsch, Wietske Maas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Travis Meinolf, Emilio Moreno, Read-in, Martha Rosler, Helke Sander, Kateřina Šedá, Patricia Sousa, Xu Tan, Valerie Tevere & Angel Nevarez, Mirjam Thomann, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Jort van der Laan, Agnès Varda, Werker Magazine, Vincent Wittenberg, and Haegue Yang.

Spatial design is by Ruth Buchanan and Andreas Müller. Exhibition map and signage is developed by Åbäke.

Themes:

Through the two-year research process, four main themes emerged that have become key lines of thought for engaging the large scope of GDR research and actions.

- Domestic space: housing the commons and living together
- Domestic work: invisible labour and working at home
- Domestic property: struggles between ownership and usership
- Domestic relations: extended families, neighbours versus networks

Locations:

The works themselves perform their positions in dialogue with the exhibition themes across Casco and other venues shared by our neighbours.

1. Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Nieuwekade 213–215, Utrecht www.cascoprojects.org
Casco is transformed into a living and working space, functioning as 'home base' of the exhibition and further actions. It is also where GDR's cooperative sitcom 'Our Autonomous Life?' is produced and screened, and includes space for children and the GDR library.

2. Volksbuurt Museum, Waterstraat 27–29, Utrecht www.volksbuurtmuseum.nl
The Volksbuurt Museum finds its seed in Committee Wijk C, founded in 1974 to preserve and recover the neighbourhood, where Casco is also situated, in response to rapid urban renewal and demolition projects. GDR works are cohabiting with the various documents and objects in this local folks' museum. Annexed as a temporary structure to Volksbuurt Museum is 18b Pavilion consisting of the structural devices installed in the former GDR apartment.

3. De Rooie Rat, Oudegracht 65, Utrecht www.rooierat.nl
De Rooie Rat is the oldest leftist political bookstore in the Netherlands, established in 1974 just up the canal from Casco. Works that call for action mingle with the inspiring books at De Rooie Rat!

Occasions:
Watch out for the activities throughout the exhibition, including pilot premiere of the cooperative sitcom 'Our Autonomous Life?', 'Teach-in' by Read-in, 'Kitchen 139' organised by W139, Amsterdam with Casco in conjunction with GDR, 'Assembly (The Grand Domestic Revolution)' by Agency, 'Keywords Cooking School' book launch by Xu Tan, collective futurist fiction writing conference and home schools on GDR Future' (finnissage?). More information is available on our website or GDR wiki.

6 November 2011–26 February 2012
Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory
Utrecht,The Netherlands
Source :www.cascoprojects.org

Schwinn

2011-11-04T16:56:00.000-07:00

I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts,
and I’d like to quit the committee
for naming tornadoes. Do you remember
how easy and sad it was to be young
and defined by our bicycles? My first
was yellow, and though it was no Black
Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity
I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone,
chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods
with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear
family in a television show totally unaffected
by a distant war. Then we returned
to the green living room to watch the No Names
hold our Over the Hill Gang under
the monotinted chromatic defeated Super
Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly
caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building
on K Street NW where a few minor law firms
mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers
and Meat Cutters. A black hand
already visits my father in sleep, moving
up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will
never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it, which is why I am standing
here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,
doing what I’m supposed to do.

Matthew Zapruder
“Schwinn” from Come on All You Ghosts, 2010.

Sports Cottage built with masonite

2011-11-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

Sports Cottage biult with masonite, 1946, Sweden.

Outdoor Furniture

2011-11-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

In the heart of the expanding "docklands" of Malmo's harbour i had to deal with a remarkable number of public design. Winter 2011.

Swedish exhibition of Modern Homes

2011-11-01T15:32:00.001-07:00

..at Malmo 7-28 September, 1939 and illustrated by Anders Beckman, a very active artist of his time. I found this poster from the Annual "Svensk Reklam" publication, P.A Norstedt &Soner, Stockholm, 1939.

Le Corbu et la Suedoise (Marguerite Tjader Harris)

2011-11-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

Le Corbu et la Suedoise (Marguerite Tjader Harris), 2011.
Wood, plywood, clay, felt, acrylic
133 x 92 x 86 cm

One World Government? Not So Fast!

2011-11-01T15:14:00.000-07:00

Since the Enlightenment, human civilization has increasingly lived with the presumption that, via reason and knowledge, we would have the power to manage.

It is the so-called "General Motors" view of scientific management that took hold from the 1950s onwards. We argue that it is a profoundly inadequate model for how businesses, societies and civilizations evolve.
If one looks at the United Nations and other post-World War II, Bretton-Woods institutions such as World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), there seems to have been, since their inception, the same mid-20th Century faith that such management might even lead to some form of a centralized world governance structure that would "know" and "allocate" and "manage."This view of global governance and this arrangement of international organizations is misguided, even dangerous. It can't adequately cope with many issues, including global climate change, food insecurity, loss of biodiversity and other similar global policy problems.

The slender loris: looking for solutions to deforestation and other biodiversity challenges.

Policy makers — both global and local — need to question one of the central assumptions found in top-down scientific management models. This assumption states that a global or "regional" social welfare function could be used as a proxy to design institutions and their organizational functions. We argue that no one can pre-state what new "salients" of economic or cultural activities will arise, from what little or large triggers. Critically, not only do we not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen.Optimization and control relying solely on the variables known right now is often a dangerous illusion. We cannot optimize over a state space of a pre-defined social welfare function. We do not know the new relevant variables that will arise.

Instead, an evolving and adaptive complex-systems approach to global governance, with one's focus on wise enablement, not control, might provide an alternative way to design the functions and capacities of international organizations.Under this view, we are called upon to be open to the partially unknowable adjacent possible, not to control, but to enable and adapt, and partially shape what will emerge. This is the profound opposite of the General Motors model, from dictatorship and from a controlling global governance managed by the elites who "know."Under this complex-systems perspective, we begin to see democracy in a new light, a framework of freedoms and procedures that allows and enables adaptability, shaping the possibilities of where we will go.If we assess the three global crises currently known as global climate change, global food insecurity and global biodiversity loss, we find that centralized decision makers at international organizations such as the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organization (WTO) have valued maximization of economic growth as a primary decision element.

That emphasis has led to unintended environmental and social effects, including global climate change, global biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and increasing food insecurity.Emphasis on maximizing economic efficiency for global production of goods and services has led to strongly centralized "free trade policies" that are enforced by international organizations such as WTO. The environmental impacts of such free trade policies have not been internalized through imposition of Pigovian taxes in the conduct of international trade.

The powerful industrial north and allied transnational corporations have been able to negotiate terms of trade that maximize their profits and retain current socio-political power patterns, while greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from the global industrial complex, mining, deforestation, wasteful consumption and energy burning continue to accumulate in coupled atmospheric and oceanic systems. Global climate change science is unable to predict an accurate timing of critical phase transition; however all global circulation models agree that our business-as-usual path of GHG emission trajectory will sooner or later cause a phase transition in the coupled atmospheric system; after which socio-political policy actions and behavioral changes by themselves will not be adequate to stop run-away climate change because natural bio-geo-chemical cycle would have degenerated to the point that reduction in anthropogenic GHG emissions would be inadequate to stop global warming effect from playing havoc in the global socio-ecological systems.

Protection of free trade through centralized global institutions and maximization of economic growth will only exacerbate GHG emissions. On the other hand, international climate policy experts are well aware of the fact that any strong action by a handful of nation-states would shift global industrial production to the nation-states that do not take any meaningful action on regulating GHG emissions.The governance of global climate, food and biodiversity crises pose a fundamental normative or value ambiguity challenge, i.e., experts in centralized international organizations do not and can not know the space of variables and strategies over which the optimization-decision problem is to be stated. Both the mitigation of and adaptation to global climate change requires deep, long-term foresight, and unwavering collective/normative human action at the global scale.

Yet, the complexity of managing global-climatic change, and its impacts on irreversibly changing the evolutionary pathways of biological, technological and economic systems, remains a deep puzzle, beyond the reach of positive sciences.From a normative standpoint, which is an essential component of any governance effort to deal with the complexity of complex systems, international organizations need to move beyond the positivistic goals of managing and controlling global socio-ecological systems. Management and international organization sciences need to move beyond "optimization-envy."There is a need to accommodate both facts (understanding) and values (normative prescriptions) for managing global environmental and social crises. Furthermore, management and international organization sciences will need to let go of reductionism and replace it with the acknowledgment of normative (or value-laden) complexity of managing complexity.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to explore, not control, "enablement" and adaptability to manage huge systems which engender ever new relevant features that alter the wisdom of earlier management plans. Again, we not only do not know what will happen, we do not know what can happen, hence we must change our organizations to reflect this reality of the real world as it evolves. Enablement and adaptability may well require a mixture of interacting local and regional structures that explore, cooperate and compete for wise policy decision.

This is the opposite of global, top-down control pretending that it knows. Further, given the complexity of dealing with global climate change, global food insecurity and global biodiversity loss, the rationalist and normative arguments based upon the logic of Pareto optimality and Nash equilibria lead to poorly defined international institutions that create perverse incentives for local and indigenous communities, displace biodiversity through the removal of old growth forests, engender inequities due to century old property right and tenure conflicts, assume technological methodologies that cannot objectively assign baselines and, above all, place a monetary value on natural and biological systems that trivializes the worth of biodiversity and social-ecological systems through assumption-laden, institutional-design frameworks and game theory.Due to the many invalid assumptions, and a lack of reality-checks, the Pareto optimal fitness landscapes could not be pre-defined by rational and/or centralized planners. This in turn implies that global social welfare functions could not be pre-defined by rational planners.

We emphasize this un-prestatibility by arguing that the expected utility functions and strategy spaces of different stakeholder groups are not fixed; rather they are context dependent and change in unknowable ways. The expected utility functions and strategy spaces of different stakeholders change with changes in technology, boundary conditions, biological evolution and other endogenous and exogenous drivers of change in the social-ecological systems that are typically ignored when modeled by Pareto-optimizing rational planners.Global governance mechanisms and policy designs need to incorporate a complex-systems perspective in designing and supporting international policy and institutional mechanisms.

Under a complex-systems perspective, social-ecologoical systems could transition in and out of multiple stable states, or even exist far from equilibrium. Instead of arguing over the design of inter-temporal global welfare functions, or assuming that economic growth is the dominant criteria in setting up utility functions for macroeconomic policy making, a complex-systems perspective opens up the possibility of an adaptive, decentralized and democratically anchored global governance.

Text by Asim Zia and Stuart Kauffman
Source:www.npr.org, Sept.6, 2011

En svensk utopist

2011-11-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

Nils Herman Quiding wrote a "rational" vision of a Swedish utopia based on the principle of equality and solidarity which in turn would constitute the basis of a society of prosperity. Here is a presentation of his oeuvre by Gustaf Henriksson. En svensk "utopist" : Nils Herman Quiding ("Nils Nilsson, arbetskarl") i belysning af hans egna skrifter bearbetade och i sammandrag populärt framstälda Holmberg, Gustaf Henriksson (författare) Björck & Börjesson och Tiden (Två utgåvor samma år med olika omslag men samma inlaga), 235 s.

Little wooden seats and the woman of his dreams

2011-10-23T14:47:00.001-07:00

Little wooden seats and the woman of his dreams, 2006
Wood mdf, plywood, metal, lamp, cd, cd player, 2 speakers, amplifier.
Variable dimensions.

In the framework of the series Every Month selections from the museum’s permanent collections are presented from October 12th until November 30th on the mezzanine.
Little wooden seats and the woman of his dreams, 2006 by Kostis Velonis has been chosen as Work of the Month for October – November.

The theme of several of Kostis Velonis’ works deals with emotions such as desire, love, failure, loneliness, loss and melancholy. In the work Little wooden seats and the woman of his dreams, 2006 the artist deals with a love story between two historical figures and creates an intensely poetic work, giving a timeless dimension to the emotions of the love story that he “narrates”. Herodes Atticus after the wrongful death of his wife Aspasia Rigillis mourned so much that he decided to honor the memory of his wife by building the “Rigillis Conservatory” later renamed “Odeon of Herodes Atticus”. Velonis creates a sound installation consisting of a model of the Conservatory, on which he places a large wooden heart that lights up the space. The red light refers to the color of passion and attributes a dramatic element to the installation. On the last stand of the theater, the artist has placed two small stools of different size that refer to the two figures of his story, but also encourage daydreaming around imaginary relationships. In the surrounding space a cover of the song The first time ever I saw your face by Ewan MacColl is heard, sung by Johnny Cash. The special, deep and bass voice of the famous American singer and composer heightens the intensity of the drama and melancholy, while simultaneously bringing to mind the lament of MacColl for the loss of his wife, to whom he had dedicated this particular song in 1957. In Velonis’ sound installation the two stories of love and grief meet each other.

The red light refers to the color of passion and attributes a dramatic element to the installation. On the last stand of the theater, the artist has placed two small stools of different size that refer to the two figures of his story, but also encourage daydreaming around imaginary relationships. In the surrounding space a cover of the song The first time ever I saw your face by Ewan MacColl is heard, sung by Johnny Cash. The special, deep and bass voice of the famous American singer and composer heightens the intensity of the drama and melancholy, while simultaneously
bringing to mind the lament of MacColl for the loss of his wife, to whom he had dedicated this particular song in 1957. In Velonis’ sound installation the two stories of love and grief meet each other.

EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens
12/10/2011 - 30/11/2011

Bragg’s Law

2011-10-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

Josephine Schuppang of Technical University in Berlin writes,

I was pointed to your blog when I talked to a friend about my newest tattoo. He told me that you are collecting scientific tattoos. I didn’t even know there were other people who did that sort of thing. You bet my tattoo artist looked strangely at me for my request.

So attached find a picture of my tattoo of Bragg’s Law. It is along the side of my left foot and shows nicely in my favorite pair of heels.

I studied Physics, and although I wanted to go in to Astronomy I got lost a bit and landed in Crystallography, which has a long history here in Berlin. Last year I wrote my thesis on the transmission electron microscopy of nitride semiconductors. After my defense I wanted to get a tattoo to remember this occasion. But all the formulas I did use were too long and complex to use, and all the images I took wouldn’t have worked.

So I decided on a fundamental formula, Bragg’s Law. It is important for electron diffraction, so that fits. And I have always liked the Bragg story, the father-son tag team of physics and the fact that William Lawrence Bragg was only 25 when they got their Nobel Prize.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

2011-10-23T12:18:00.000-07:00

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

The Occupy Wall Street movement spreads to London (Image: Dave Stock)

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy

Text by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
Source: www.newscientist.com
19 October 2011.

The world is a forgetful place

2011-10-23T10:34:00.000-07:00

Is all memory technology an invitation to forgetting?

At the new, wonderfully overwhelming LA Review of Books, Casey Walker uses Joshua Foer’s “Moonwalking with Einstein” to raise the difficult question that seems to be at the heart of the recent study surveyed here on transactive memory, at the crux of this Radiolab segment, and at the nexus of much apprehension about the future of the internet.

As Casey writes:
“The world is a forgetful place. We cannot remember even what we wish to, what we’ve tried so hard to hold onto, our holy books and most famous writers and the terrain of the planet on which we live. Call it the Sebald problem: the mind is always lapsing into oblivion.”

And we worry that technology — once it was writing, now it’s computers — is aiding and abetting this dispersal of memory into oblivion. Rather than inviting us to forget, however, Casey points out that ever more complex technologies actually bolster the sort of “effortless” memory we rely on in our “more prosaic lives.” We don’t need to be “memory champions,” like the ones Foer aspires to imitate in his book (prodigies who can instantly recall umpteen digits of Pi) because we have technology that stores such information, leaving our minds free to learn and think and remember other things. Or, as Casey puts it, “We might remember less, but we still know more, which makes it hard to mourn the memory palace’s loss.”

The concern that technology is destroying our memory seems even more bizarre, bordering on the realm of paradoxical, since we simultaneously worry that data storage technology will never allow us to forget. As Jeffery Rosen wrote just last summer in a New York Times Magazine front page piece called, “The End of Forgetting,” forgetting has immense social value, but the advance of memory technology “increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past.”

How are we supposed to make sense of the interaction between the web and memory if we believe that the Internet is pushing our memories into oblivion at the same time that we insist on our “constitutional right to oblivion” and “reinventing forgetting on the Internet”?

Wikipedia is the perfect embodiment of these conflicting anxieties. On the one hand, Wikipedia (plus a solid 3G or WiFi connection) offers a convenient source of transactive memory — we don’t need to carry random trivia around in our brains because Wikipedia will “remember” it for us. On the other hand, Wikipedia has the potential to present a biased documentation of biographical information that could prevent the sort of social forgetting Rosen was writing about. Thus, Wikipedia represents what we love and hate about computing technology all at the same time — instant access to unbridled information — suggesting that our continued efforts to make conclusive statements about the future of memory and technology are futile because it ignores the magnificent complexity of both.

We can embrace or denounce futuristic narratives about downloadable brains or the death of privacy at the (algorithmic) hands of online personalization, but it’s hard to imagine a future in which we don’t protect both our biological memory, no matter its shortcomings, and our privacy, no matter how much we seek transparent information.

In the great human story, it’s not the end of memory or the end of forgetting. The tale is still unfolding as our memories are adapting to technology and we are adapting technology to complement our memories.

Source: mneumozine.tumblr.com/
9 sept. 2011

Bad Sign

2011-10-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

Visiting recently NYC i was not prepared to see in the Occupy wall street demonstration this rather right -wing jew -hater guy at Zuccotti Park displaying with such a way his anti-Zionist zeal. October 13, 2011.

"Folkets Hus" - Local Labour Centers

2011-10-22T16:41:00.000-07:00

..Known as "Folkets Hus" in Sweden, they have been built by the labour organisations to provide meeting halls. In this publication that i found today, there is the presentation of the local labour center of Kristianstad, 1964.
They vary in size, but the emphasis is at the modernization of the building with the help of co-operative building societies and the welfare state.

The Same Sad Rhetoric

2011-10-22T16:27:00.001-07:00

The Same Sad Rhetoric, 2011
166 x 150 x 88 cm
Wood,acrylic.

Monodrome

2011-10-22T16:23:00.001-07:00

The 3rd Athens Biennale 2011 MONODROME is considered the final part of a trilogy which started with DESTROY ATHENS 2007 and continued with HEAVEN 2009. Drawing upon the life and work of Walter Benjamin and inspired by his book by the same title (One way Street, 1928), MONODROME is curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and X&Y (Xenia Kalpaktsoglou and Poka-Yio, co-founders of the Athens Biennale). It is a narrative broadcasting from historical venues in the centre of Athens and articulating an imaginary dialogue between The Little Prince and Walter Benjamin. As the intellectual retreats defeated in the face of the escalated distress, the Little Prince keeps questioning this condition with the disarming innocence and the plainspoken boldness of a child.

MONODROME is being realized despite the Crisis that affects Greece heavily. Produced in a state of emergency, and through the synergy of all participants and a large group of volunteers, MONODROME assembles the diverse pieces of an exploratory puzzle, addressing the "here and now". At the same time the exhibition attempts to question historical narratives that have functioned as dictums of the Greek sociopolitical and aesthetic identity and resulted in the country's perennial suspension between a ‘before' (tradition) and an ‘after' (modernization). Being usually perceived and promoted as an emblematic city, Athens today is the epicentre of the Greek upheaval, a place of massive demonstrations and public discussions.

MONODROME aims to provoke debate around something that has broken down, but also offer the possibility at a glimpse of something new to come.

Participants: Bas Jan Ader, David Adler, The Angelo Foundation, Archisearch, Aristide Antonas,Badlands Unlimited, Vassili Balatsos, Kostas Bassanos, Hans op de Beeck, Filanthi Bogea, Pierre Bonnard, Yannis Bournias, Andrea Bowers, Vlassis Caniaris, Freddie Carabott, Paul Chan, Pantelis Chandris, Nikos Charalambidis, Marcus Coates, Ida-Marie Corell, Cultural Center of Olympic Airways Employees' (POLKEOA), Josef Dabernig, Daily Lazy, Mark Dion & Robert Williams, Jimmy Durham, Shannon Ebner, Sean Edwards, Elmgreen & Dragset, Matias Faldbakken, Floater, Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapić, Sam Forsythe & New Forms of Life, Dimitrios Galanis, Liam Gillick, Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville , Katerina Gogou, Vangelis Gokas, Jens Haaning, Vasileios Hatzis, Imagine the City, Yota Ioannidou & Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio, Georgina Kakoudaki & 4Frontal, Stelios Karamanolis & Toula Ploumi, Agni Katzouraki, Michalis Katzourakis, Kavecs Projects, Janice Kerbel, Kernel, Jakob Kolding, Nikos Koundouros, Panayiotis Lambrou, Julien Langendorff, "Leaking" Intervention, Esther Lemi, Lucas Lenglet, Norman Leto, Andreas Lolis, Tonis Lykouressis, Lucky PDF, Makis Malafekas, Caroline May, Vassilis Mazomenos, Metahaven, Tracey Moffat, "Neos Aristophanes", Periodical circa 1889-1894, Yannis Oikonomides, Henrik Olesen, Orizontas Gegonoton, Jean Painlevé, Rallou Panagiotou, Maria Papadimitriou, Rena Papaspyrou, Christos Papoulias, Vicky Pericleous, Paris Petridis, Phrixos, Julien Prévieux, The Public School, Józef Robakowski, Tom Sachs, San Francisco Actor's Workshop / Herbert Blau, Kostas Sfikas, Dionysis Sotovikis, Spyros Staveris, Studio Karamanolis, Fiona Tan, TANK TV, Yannis Theodoropoulos, Theophilos Hatzimichael, Harald Thys & Jos de Gruyter, Jalal Toufic, Under Construction, Yorgos Vakirtzis, Ino Varvariti, Vangelis Vlahos, We Never Closed, Uygur Yilmaz

3rd Athens Biennale 2011 MONODROME
23 October - 11 December 2011

Markets Can Be Very, Very Wrong

2011-10-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

Muller, Mendelsohn, and Nordhaus have a new paper in the American Economic Review that should be a major factor in how we discuss economic ideology. It won’t, of course, but let me lay out the case anyway.

What MMN do is estimate the cost imposed on society by air pollution, and allocate it across industries. The costs being calculated, by the way, don’t include the long-run threat of climate change; they’re focused on measurable impacts of pollution on health and productivity, with the most important effects involving how pollutants — especially small particulates — affect human health, and use standard valuations on mortality and morbidity to turn these into dollars.

Even with this restricted vision of costs, they find that the costs of air pollution are big, and heavily concentrated in a few industries. In fact, there are a number of industries that inflict more damage in the form of air pollution than the value-added by these industries at market prices.

It’s important to be clear about what this means. It does not necessarily say that we should end the use of coal-generated electricity. What it says, instead, is that consumers are paying much too low a price for coal-generated electricity, because the price they pay does not take account of the very large external costs associated with generation. If consumers did have to pay the full cost, they would use much less electricity from coal — maybe none, but that would depend on the alternatives.

At one level, this is all textbook economics. Externalities like pollution are one of the classic forms of market failure, and Econ 101 says that this failure should be remedied through pollution taxes or tradable emissions permits that get the price right. What Muller et al are doing is putting numbers to this basic proposition — and the numbers turn out to be big. So if you really believed in the logic of free markets, you’d be all in favor of pollution taxes, right?

Hahahahaha. Today’s American right doesn’t believe in externalities, or correcting market failures; it believes that there are no market failures, that capitalism unregulated is always right. Faced with evidence that market prices are in fact wrong, they simply attack the science.

What this tells us is that we are not actually having a debate about economics. Our free-market advocates aren’t actually operating from a model of how the economy works; they’re operating from some combination of knee-jerk defense of the haves against the rest and mystical faith that self-interest always leads to the common good.

And they’re wrong, with every breath we take.

Text by Paul Krugman
Source: New York Times,30 Sept.2011

Clothed with the Sun.·.

2011-10-22T03:08:00.000-07:00

Panos Tsagaris, Clothed with the Sun.·.
76x56cm, 2011.

October Tune

2011-10-22T03:05:00.000-07:00

A stuffed quail
on the mantelpiece minds its tail.
The regular chirr of the old clock's healing
in the twilight the rumpled helix.
Through the window,birch candles fail.

For the fourth day the sea hits the dike with the hard horizon.
Put aside the book, take your sewing kit;
patch my clothes without turning the light on:
golden hair
keeps the corner lit.

Joseph Brodsky
(1968/translated by the author)

Au hasard Balthazar

2011-10-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
Dir: Robert Bresson
Here is the final scene, very painful especially for all those viewers that have seen the film in the past.

As delicate as an ass’s bray

2011-10-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

As delicate as an ass’s bray are the little lights which descend from the distant city inside you can’t pedal fast enough to get there and when you finally do catbirds have called it a day ears grow dim you are barely a sound so you head out again for the ring of trees.

Julia Story, 2011.

Reconstructed Window with Frame

2011-10-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

Det rekonstruerade fonstret med karm, foto I.Roth
Malmo, Sweden.

What Happens when a Leftist Philosopher Discovers God?

2011-10-09T07:33:00.000-07:00

Society is the social science journal superbly edited by Jonathan Imber. In its fall issue it carries an article by Philippe Portier (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris), entitled “Religion and Democracy in the Thought of Juergen Habermas”. Coincidentally, in a recent issue of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Habermas is on a list of German celebrity intellectuals who pop up continuously in the media. (The list includes Margot Kaessmann, the Protestant bishop who resigned after being caught driving under the influence. Curiously, she only became a celebrity after this unfortunate incident.) Habermas has been a public intellectual (a more polite term for celebrity) for a very long time. I have never been terribly interested in Habermas, but the coincidence made me think about him. Portier’s article does tell an intriguing story. It might be called a man-bites-dog story.

Habermas is exactly my age. Our paths crossed briefly in the 1960s, when he was a visiting professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where I was then teaching. We did not particularly take to each other. I was put off by both his leftist politics and his ponderous philosophical language. (German philosophers, no matter where located on the ideological spectrum, vie with each other in producing texts which are comprehensible only to a small group of initiates.) I also sensed a certain professorial arrogance. I remember reading a response by Habermas to a critic, limited to the statement that he refused to discuss with an individual who quoted Hegel from a secondary source.

Habermas first received a doctorate in philosophy, but moved toward sociology under the influence of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, then acquired a second doctorate in the latter field under the fiercely Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth. In 1964 he became a professor in Frankfurt, as successor to Max Horkheimer, who by then was a neo-Marxist icon. Habermas was a hero of the so-called student revolution which erupted in the late 1960s. His students fanned out across West German academia, creating a network which for a while administered an effective ideological hegemony in the human sciences. At the time I found Habermas’ role in this rather objectionable. But I gave him credit for distancing himself sharply from the more radical wing of the student movement, as he later distanced himself from the anti-Enlightenment views of the postmodernists. In 1981 Habermas published his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, a strong endorsement of reason as the foundation of public life in a democracy. He retired from his professorship in 1993, but not from his role as an active advocate of Enlightenment rationality. It is debatable how far his more recent work still continues under a neo-Marxist theoretical umbrella. His views on religion have shifted considerably.

Portier distinguishes three phases in Habermas’ treatment of religion. In phase one, lasting up to the early 1980s, he still viewed religion as an “alienating reality”, a tool of domination for the powerful. In good Marxist tradition, he thought that religion would eventually disappear, as modern society comes to be based on “communicative rationality” and no longer needs the old irrational illusions. In phase two, roughly 1985-2000, this anti-religious animus is muted. Religion now is seen as unlikely to disappear, because many people (though presumably not Habermas) continue to need its consolations. The public sphere, however, must be exclusively dominated by rationality. Religion must be relegated to private life. One could say that in this phase, at least in the matter of religion, Habermas graduated from Marxism to the French ideal of laicite—the public life of the republic kept antiseptically clean of religious contamination.

Phase three is more interesting. As of the late 1990s Habermas’ view of religion is more benign. Religion is now seen as having a useful public function, quite apart from its private consolations. The “colonization” of society by “turbo-capitalism” (nice term—I don’t know if Habermas coined it) has created a cultural crisis and has undermined the solidarity without which democratic rationality cannot function. We are now moving into a “post-secular society”, which can make good use of the “moral intuition” that religion still supplies. Following in the footsteps of Ernst Bloch and other neo-Marxist philo-Godders, Habermas also credits Biblical religion, Judaism and Christianity, for having driven out magical thinking (here there is an echo of Max Weber’s idea of “ the disenchantment of the world”), and for having laid the foundations of individual autonomy and rights.

Habermas developed these ideas in a number of publications and media interviews. The most interesting source (not discussed by Portier in the article) is a 2007 publication by a Catholic press, The Dialectics of Secularization. It is a conversation between Habermas and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (at the time of this exchange head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, subsequently Pope Benedict XVI). Habermas here gives credit to Christianity for being the purveyor of a universal egalitarianism and for an openness to reason, thus continuing to provide moral substance for democracy. Not surprisingly, Ratzinger agreed.

I am not sure what Habermas’ personal beliefs are. But I don’t think that his change of mind about religion has anything to do with some sort of personal conversion. Rather, as has been the case with most sociologists of religion, Habermas has looked at the world and concluded that secularization theory—that is, the thesis that modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion—does not fit the facts of the matter. Beyond this acknowledgement of the empirical reality of the contemporary world, Habermas admits the historical roots in Biblical religion of modern individualism, and he thinks that this connection is still operative today. Yet, when all is said and done, Habermas now has a positive view of religion (at least in its Judaeo-Christian version) for utilitarian reasons: Religion, whether true or not, is socially useful.

Let us stipulate that smoking is unhealthy. Let us then assume that a tribe in some remote jungle believes that tobacco smoke attracts malevolent spirits. A public health official sent into the region does not, of course, share this superstition. But he makes use of it in dissuading people from acquiring a taste for newly available cigarettes—because he knows that some people do the right thing for a wrong reason. Eventually, he thinks, people will do the right thing for a better reason. And that will be the end of the demonological theory of tobacco smoke.

Any sociologist will agree that religion, true or not, is useful for the solidarity and moral consensus of society. The problem is that this utility depends on at least some people actually believing that there is the supernatural reality that religion affirms. The utility ceases when nobody believes this anymore.

Edward Gibbon, in chapter 2 of his famous history of the decline of the Roman Empire, has this to say: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful”. When you cross the philosopher with the magistrate, you get Habermas.

Text by Peter Berger
Source:blogs.the-american-interest.com/berger

Little gardens of happiness

2011-10-08T06:02:00.000-07:00

TAF is pleased to present the exhibition Little Gardens of Happiness, which opens on Thursday, November 10 and will run until December 11, 2011. The exhibition is curated by the students of the Curating and Organizing Art Exhibitions seminar, part of the Athens College – College of Psyhiko adult continuing education programmes, and is led by curator and art critic Marina Fokides.
“Near to the sorrow of the world, and often upon its volcanic earth, man has laid out his little gardens of happiness;” Guided by the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, the curators attempt to pose timely questions regarding the possible ways in which societies react in times of crisis.
Man has the inherent tendency to voluntarily create for himself personal microcosms; small, intimate utopias that safeguard his remaining shreds of happiness. This personal space seems to operate as a symbolically protected garden – shelter. Sometimes however, these gardens transform into a personal hell where the individual feels isolated.
To what extent do these personal universes offer relief, to what extent do they cause terror and how extreme can they become? In this present time of uncertainty the little gardens of happiness can operate as spaces of self-organization and reevaluation, as sources of contrivance and as spaces of invention and mental formation and help us provide answers to the questions posed by reality itself.
Giorgos Panousopoulos’ film Mania will be shown as part of the exhibition.
Participating artists:
Stathis Athanasiou, Steven Antonakos, Kostis Velonis, Nikos Giavropoulos, Vangelis Gokas, Eunomia Dimitriadou, Theodoros Zafiropoulos, Christos Kolios, Giorgos Korbakis, Alexis Kiritsopoulos, Leda Luss Luyken, Vally Nomidou, Zafos Xagoraris, Giorgos Panousopoulos, Marie-Françoise Poutays, Marina Provatidou, Xenis Sahinis, Dimitris Tsoublekas, Pantelis Chandris, Manolis Charos, Alexandros Psihoulis, En Flo, Organization Earth
Curators:
Fotini Vergidou, Pinelopi Katsatou, Evangelia Melissourgaki, Poulheria Papageorgiou, Eleni Papagiannopoulou, Calliope Stamatacou

Exhibition opening: Thursday 10 November 2011, 20.30
TAF Gallery, Athens.

Junta Aesthetics

2011-10-07T04:11:00.000-07:00

“The vision is but one. It is well known, it is certifiable, it is the vision of Greece. The Greece of Greece. Greece which will be for the Greeks their lives, their purpose. And it will be asked: What is the form of the vision?
G. Papadopoulos in the newspaper Eléftheros Kósmos, 10-2-68.

Bost’s cartoon for the Nation's Vow.Magazine "Anti".

35 years after the restoration of democracy the military regime is still remembered as imposing a particular aesthetics of its own devising. As Káti to Oréon, published by the friends of ANTI magazine who experienced the Junta, aptly reminds us, “Vulgarity, pomposity, militarism and continually atrocious taste marked the events and language of the dictatorship of the 21st of April.” Those not yet born at the time mainly experience this seven year period through television and are likely to associate it with a few select moments—black and white footage of celebrations of “the military Glory of Greece,” for example, or Papadopoulos’s famous words: “Hellas is a patient who needs to be placed on the operating table.” But what might proceed from a recognition that the aesthetics of the Junta have a history prior to the Junta, that in fact the Junta institutionalized an aesthetics already in place and already quite popular? Small-scale re-enactments of the diachronic virtues of Hellenism on the occasion of national celebrations were popular at schools throughout the 20th century. The usage of a certain language as indicative of a preference for the extreme right certainly pre-dates the 21st of April, while the origins of architectural projects of national grandiose such as the Táma tou Éthnous can be traced to the beginning of the 19th century, the Epanástasi, and the years of the King Otto. There is also much more to the aesthetics of this period than what is publicly remembered and discursively allowed to be expressed. The fact that prominent figures of Greek public life—Aliki Vougiouklaki, Dimitris Papamichail, Kostas Voutsas, Viki Moscholiou, Evangelos Papanoutsos, Ilias Lalaounis, and Konstantinos Doxiadis to name a few—participated in the public production of a certain aesthetics during the Junta raises an important question: How do we regard the professional activities of individuals in times of non-democratic rule? Along which lines is the history of the recent past produced? If certain figures are stigmatized for empowering a military regime by virtue of continuing to work, why is such stigma largely absent from their contemporary biographies?

This panel discussion on the aesthetics of a painful period attempts to address these questions by exploring the case of those who did not resort to silence, did not choose self-imposed exile, but continued to live and work in Greece during the dictatorship. It brings together two artists and two academics (a presenter and a panel discussant) working across media (literature, video art, photographic essay, and ethnographic paper) to facilitate a dialogue between contemporary art and modern Greek studies as well as a larger discussion on the Junta, its culture, and its continuous divisive impact on Greek society. Untitled (The Remake) 13 min.
The panel commences with the screening of Untitled (The Remake). This is a single channel video installation investigating Junta aesthetics through the use of archival material from the years 1967-1974, a detailed reconstruction of Studio B of Τ.Ε.Δ (Television of the Armed Forces) and the artist’s own video footage. The video commences with official celebrations, festivities and parades in the Athens Marble Stadium and then depicts preparations for an evening broadcast. Three actors enact the final preparations of two newscasters and a cameraman minutes before they go “on air.” In the background, monitors show international news and original black and white footage of the real newscasters getting ready for the broadcast. The video’s structure encourages a range of theoretical explorations and attributes multiple interpretations to its title: Remake. It reminds us of the historical moments out of which Greek Television was born, while also commenting on the possibility of reality reconstruction, the fundamental role technology plays in this process, a dictatorial regime’s propaganda mechanisms and the ways in which reality is documented and presented in the news.

Kostis Velonis, The Nation's Vow-Ταμα του Εθνους, Ongoing project(detail), 2011

The Nations Vow: Part I (ethnographic essay) and Part II (photographic essay)
Following the screening of the Remake, the panel presents the preliminary findings of a research project undertaken by an anthropologist and a visual artist concerning the Táma tou Éthnous (The Nation’s Vow). The term refers both to a collective vow and to a (unrealized) church that Greek notables promised to construct in the early years of the Epanástasi. Almost a century and a half later, the idea of fulfilling the old vow was revived by the military regime, which launched several architectural contests, established a special fund, and organized fundraising campaigns.

The junta’s conception of the project was first articulated in documents introducing the architectural competitions (later mocked by ANTI for their incoherency and particular writing style). Eventually this enterprise drew the interest of shipping magnets, businessmen, artists, architects, and engineers.

Konstantinos Doxiadis, for instance, obsessed with the Táma as early as 1964, produced plans, models, and monographs elaborating on the significance of the Nation’s Vow and the steps to be taken towards its fulfilment, while jewellery designer Ilias Lalaounis published newspaper articles in which he proposed a particular architecture for the Táma inspired by a study of the dome of St Sophia. The ethnographic paper and the photographic essay (i.e. two approaches to the same theme) explore the controversial story of this endeavour by revisiting developments in 20th century modernist architecture and presenting oral accounts (e.g. interviews with Stylianos Pattakos) and archival material (ranging from topographical maps produced by the National Technical University to Bost’s cartoons).

In this way the project inquires into an unrealized government enterprise that would have radically altered the Athenian landscape, may well have marked the end of modernism in Church construction, sheds light on a peculiar conception of nationhood as articulated in the proposed architecture of the Táma and poses a question concerning the mechanisms that block large scale state initiatives: Why was the Táma never built?

MGSA Panel Proposal
Participants: Kostis Kornetis (Brown University) Dimitris Antoniou (organizer, University of Oxford), Stefanos Tsivopoulos(ISCP NY International Studio Curatorial Program), Kostis Velonis (University of Thessaly, IASPIS, Sweden)
The 22nd Biennial MGSA Symposium is being held at
New York University
October 13-16, 2011.

Easy Exotic

2011-10-01T15:28:00.000-07:00

There is at least three modes of travel, and most trips contain a blend of all three. You can graph the three extremes as three corners of a Travel Triangle: Relaxation, Destination, and Experience. The ideal trip would have an equal balance of all three, but most trips favor one side over the others. In my own personal travel I favor experience and destination and have almost no interest in relaxation. Your mileage may vary.

he three extremes represent a set of overlapping qualities.

Experience includes learning, change, difference, passions, uncertainties. A trip in this corner emphasizes encountering strange things, having your mind changed, going beyond your comfort, meeting as much otherness as you can.

Destination includes traveling with goals and achievements in mind -- completing a long thru-hike, or journey to a mountain peak, or all the state capitals, or completing a race, to be the first, or your personal best.

Relaxation is just that: rest, comfort, renewal, a sabbatical, a retreat from the worries and business of everyday life. It may include luxury but might be primitive or primeval.

Because I am deeply attracted to experience and learning, I find myself heading toward the exotic in my travels. Whenever I have a chance, I want to go to the most different place I can get to the fastest. And I rarely want to return to where I've been. In the relaxing mode of travel, returning to the same place is a large part of what makes it relaxing, even deeply comforting. The "family place" is of this type of renewal. In general this kind of restful vacation does not re-charge my batteries. I need to be squeezed by new things, rubbed hard with differences, and moved by something I did not expect. So in my travel I try to optimize "otherness." I am not looking for discomfort per se, or just roughing it, an outright death-defying adventure. That's a bit more destination and goal oriented than my fancy. In fact, learning does not have to be done out in the rain. You can journey to otherness without making it an endurance race. That's a balance I look for: trips that maximize experiences without requiring a focus on just the experiences of moving, racing, overcoming, winning, and achievement.

Accessible exotic is possible. I have my favorite places where I can fly into an international airport and then within a few hours swim in a total different culture offering alien lessons. A lot of these spots are in Asia, but also in other corners in the world. The picture below was taken in a place that is no longer so accessible. But when I took this picture of goat ball game (buzkashi) in Afghanistan, I was not flying in a helicopter. Rather I had taken a $2 public bus ride to a town in the north and followed the crowds to the edge of town and was sitting on a hillside with hundreds of others watching the Friday games. It was easy and exotic. The easy exotic is not hard to find, and so immensely rewarding when touched. Easy exotic is a place you should be able to reach within 24 hours or less from your front door. And it should reveal to you at least 5 things within the first day, or next 24 hours, that cause you to smile in amazement, and wonder at the nature of humans.

Where would you go?

Source: www.kk.org/thetechnium
26 April 2011

American Progress

2011-09-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

John Gast, "American Progress," 1872.

This painting shows "Manifest Destiny" (the religious belief that the United States should expand from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean in the name of God). In 1872 artist John Gast painted a popular scene of people moving west that captured the view of Americans at the time. Called "Spirit of the Frontier" and widely distributed as an engraving portrayed settlers moving west, guided and protected by a goddess-like figure of Columbia and aided by technology (railways, telegraphs), driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity. It is also important to note that angel is bringing the "light" as witnessed on the eastern side of the painting as she travels towards the "darkened" west.
Source:wikipedia

A Rock and a Hard Place

2011-09-23T03:59:00.000-07:00

The 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, under the general title "Old Intersections-Make it New", is focused on the Mediterranean region, the culture and its people, viewed through a contemporary visual outlook. This year's Biennale comprises a main and a parallel programme including exhibitions, an international young artists' workshop, a performance festival, a symposium and a variety of artistic events, building up in every part of the city. Director: Katerina Koskina, SMCA President

This Biennale is the first joint venture of the "5 Museums' Movement in Thessaloniki"(5M) consisted of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, the Museum of Byzantine Culture, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the Teloglion Foundation of Art AUTh and the leader of the project, the State Museum of Contemporary Art-Costakis Collection. It is also part of the "Thessaloniki: Cultural Crossroads" programme of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Tourism, focussing this year on the Middle East, and running under the City of Thessaloniki, Department of Culture, Education and Tourism, 9th Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities, and other cultural and educational partners jointly.

Ilya Chashnik, Suprematist Cross, 1923

"A Rock and a Hard Place"

The programme derives its inspiration from the city, as a metaphor of the powerful multicultural character of its past history. Each and every one of the biennale venues (5 historical monuments and 5 museums) constitutes an episode of the all-embracing narrative. These episodes are inspired both by the former and the current use of these buildings, by the past and contemporary contribution to the social life and political game of the city, and the artists and the works hosted have been chosen within this particular framework.

Venues: Alatza Imaret, Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Bey Hamam, Museum of Byzantine Culture, Casa Bianca, Contemporary Art Centre of Thessaloniki, Eptapyrgio, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Teloglion Foundation of Art-AUTh.
Artists: 98 Weeks, Mounira Al Solh, Archive (Francesca Boenzi, Paolo Caffoni, Chiara Figone, Ignas Petronis), Francis Alÿs, Arab Image Foundation, Rasheed Araeen, Athanasios Argianas, Katerina Athanasopoulou, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Manfredi Beninati, Christoph Büchel, Pierpaolo Campanini, Vlassis Caniaris, Spartacus Chetwynd, Cinemathèque de Tanger, Keren Cytter, Christina Dimitriadis, Thomas Dworzak, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh (in collaboration with Arab Image Foundation), e-flux projects (Julieta Aranda & Anton Vidokle), Andreas Embirikos, Mounir Fatmi, Emmanuel Finkiel, Penelope Georgiou, Yannoulis Halepas, Steven C.Harvey, IKONOTV, Mahmoud Kaabour, Dionisis Kavallieratos, Ali Kazma, William Kentridge, Alexander Kluge, Panos Koutroubousis, Nikolaj B.S. Larsen, Solon Lekkas, Sifis Likakis, Katariina Lillqvist, Zeina Maasri, Margherita Manzelli, Irini Miga, Moataz Nasr, Bruce Nauman, Olaf Nikolai, Pavlos Nikolakopoulos, Jockum Nordström, Pantelis Pantelopoulos, Alessandro Pessoli, Michail Pirgelis, Angelo Plessas, PRISM TV (Nikos Katsaounis & Nina Paschalidou), Imran Qureshi, Jean-Marc Rochette, Marwan Sahmarani, Yiorgos Sapountzis, Hrair Sarkissian, Yehudit Sasportas, Alberto Savinio, Tayfun Serttas, Ahlam Shibli, Slavs and Tatars, Socratis Socratous, Christiana Soulou, Naoko Takahashi, Ryan Trecartin, Kostas Tsioukas, Andreas Vais, Nanos Valaoritis, Kostis Velonis, Pae White, Constantinos Xenakis.
The archive of George Lykidis and selected archives of "The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive" will also be shown.

Old Intersections-Make it New
3rd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art
Thessaloniki, Greece
18 September–18 December 2011

Curators: Paolo Colombo, Mahita El Bacha Urieta, Marina Fokidis
Architect: Andreas Angelidakis

State Museum of Contemporary Art
www.thessalonikibiennale.gr
www.greekstatemuseum.com

On Theatre and Democracy

2011-09-14T01:12:00.000-07:00

Recently, my friend (and amazing playwright/actor) Ellen McLaughlin sent me the commencement address she'd written for the students at A.R.T. This address came out of their collaboration on Ajax In Iraq, a harrowing play about the trauma of the Iraq war mirrored through the story of Ajax.The address itself looks at the twin births of theatre and democracy in Athens, and how the gift of empathy from the former enabled the creation of the latter. For me, it further articulates some of the ideas living here, and continues the difficult work of talking about value begun here. It is an eloquent, moving call for theatre makers to consider our essential responsibility to civic life.The address is 15 pages in total - it begins with words specific to the occasion, and ends with contextualizing the central ideas within the opportunities of our current political climate. I have excerpted (with her permission) pages 4-11, which constitute the heart of this particular agon. Please read and respond with your own thoughts!"Don’t forget that when you’re feeling flattened and thinking why oh why did I choose this ridiculous, humiliating profession? Remember what you’re really part of when you’re engaged in a life in the theater. Times like that, you might find it heartening to think about the Greeks, because they basically came up with the profession you’re entering into, and while they were at it they came up with, well, Western civilization. And they did it at about the same time, in the same city and with the same hammer and nails. Theater seems to have come first, but not by all that much. The city of Athens birthed two extraordinary local creations: democracy and theater. And essentially she gave birth to them as twins. Coincidence? Probably not, as anyone who has ever worked in the theater can attest. Theater, like democracy, by definition can only be done in collaboration. Both must be responsive to the needs of the moment, and they happen in the present tense. Both are done on the breath, in public; both are dependent on speech and the mysterious human grace of empathy. They must happen right now, in front of us, and we all share the same air.The Greeks didn’t come up with the rudiments of theater: ritual and storytelling. Remnants of early Greek civilizations show us what we see everywhere in the beginnings of human societies: people dancing and singing, often in groups, telling stories and talking about gods and heroes. The innovation happened when one particular singer or speaker--tradition has named him Thespis--became what we must call the first theater artist when he turned from the people watching him and spoke to another person on the stage, who could then respond in kind. Something momentous and essential to theater was created in that moment: dialogue. Greeks called that splitting of voice in dialogue or debate the agon, and once they’d invented it,they fell head over heels in love with it. Ultimately, they would use the agon for everything and everywhere, from classrooms to courtrooms to halls of government, but its first home was the theater, and there it defined the form. Without agon or dialogue, what’s happening on the stage may be many things, but it’s not theater. It’s ritual, it’s storytelling, it’s one voice speaking one authoritative truth to a passive audience. It’s a useful form, and we need it. (I need it right now.) But it ain’t theater. Because when dialogue enters the world, something profound changes in the dynamic with the audience. I like to think that when Thespis broke all the rules and spoke to another actor, everyone watching sat forward for the first time, and they’ve been sitting forward ever since. Because suddenly they had a job to do. Much would be asked of them. Theater, like democracy, makes demands. We, as an audience, have to do more than show up and get our orders. Theater turns an audience into citizens instead of just spectators. With the advent of dialogue, the truth no longer belongs to any single speaker. The truth must be found in the exchange. An audience has to follow the agon, the debate, enter into a sympathetic understanding with one speaker and then another, try out each position in order to discover what’s really going on. It’s confusing. There are times when everyone seems to be right, just as there are times when no one in the forest of voices is saying what needs to be said and it’s everything we the audience can do not to warn the actors on the stage or comfort them or just yell at them for being so blind to the truth that would be apparent to them if they were only sitting outside it as we are, listening to the agon and watching the mess onstage.This is what theater looks like, but it’s also what democracy looks like. The theater teaches us that the validity of ethical principles, beliefs, and laws must be debated in full view of everyone concerned, in the open air of the public space. Theater teaches us that the struggle to make sense of things is what we are here to do. And we must do it together if we are to do it well. It is our work. And we do it in public.There is a kind of brilliance to the light in Greece that you don’t find elsewhere. Something about the angle of the sun. Things are simply more visible there than they are anywhere else. So it’s not surprising that Greek thought is filled with notions of visibility and hiddenness.Ajax himself, not exactly an introvert, has a speech about how it is inevitable that all things will come to light eventually. For the Greeks this was not just an unavoidable truth, it was something of an injunction. “Know thyself” was the singular command and warning of the Delphic oracle, after all. Whether we will or not, the truth insists itself. It wants to be known.Our natures are mysterious and terrifying. We all know this. There is a personal darkness we are familiar with inside us, even if we have never had to stare it in the face. We can shut it deep within us, but we’ve heard it thumping around in there on quiet nights when we are alone with the worst of ourselves. We all need help with that. The Greeks had this rather outlandish notion that if we could see ourselves from the length of an auditorium, look at ourselves outside ourselves, as played by actors, doing the awful things that we, human beings, know we are capable of doing, and suffering the worst that we can imagine, we might be purged of our own darkness by the terror and pity such experiences in the theater provoke in us. It’s not surprising that theater festivals were frankly religious events for the Greeks. That ancient notion that there is a spiritual component to what happens in theaters won’t strike this crowd as odd, I trust; there’s a reason so many here have chosen this profession. We’ve all felt it, onstage and off, that transformative thing that can happen as we watch actors, those intimate, necessary strangers, acting for us and as us out there in the merciless light.What are actors after all? You are the spelunkers. The rest of us are standing in the open air above the ground, trying to guess at what’s beneath our feet—all that scary unfathomed darkness and intricacy and danger. Playwrights come up with maps of what we can make out of the hidden terrain beneath, but we give them over to the actors because actors are the ones who will strap on the headlights and throw the coiled ropes over their shoulders and go down into the deeps for us and thread their way through that blackness to find out what’s really there. We call them actors because they act for us. They venture into other selves and show us what they find. There are bumper stickers that say something like, “Got freedom? Thank a soldier.” I would suggest we campaign for a bumper sticker that says, “Got self-knowledge? Thank an actor.”Of all the things the Greeks teach us, perhaps the most essential for our purposes today is that there are worse things than failure. If I could give you only one piece of advice today it would be to live by their example and risk failure. Just look at those plays. Look at the size of what they are grappling with—they’re sounding the depths of what it is to be human; time and again, the dilemmas they pose just seem impossible to contend with, yet they take them on. These are plays of astonishing ambition and they never cease to humble me and inspire me to reach farther and risk more as an artist. Why not try to address the hardest things? The alternative is to make nice, neat plays that offend no one and do nothing much because they don’t attempt anything much. Why not risk failure and try to make, well, art? What is stake other than the size of my soul?Finally, I want to talk about empathy. The Greeks didn’t invent it, but with the creation of dialogue, they came up with a form that demands it and makes a home for it. With the invention of dialogue, an audience can move freely from one mind to another on the stage, entering different perspectives and judging their validity by holding them one by one against our own hearts. We must empathize in order to make sense. I have to put myself in her shoes, then his, then hers, and through that radical spiritual exercise I arrive at a new understanding of the world that I simply can’t reach when such demands are never put upon me. And the Greeks don’t make it easy for you. Often the characters who at first glance seem to be obviously in the right, or out of it, become figures of ambiguity or disturbing familiarity and pathos when we bring the force of empathy to bear upon them. Hundreds of years of use and scholarly analysis of these plays and still they defy reduction. They work an audience hard and wrack our hearts as we feel through them, searching for ethical balance as we struggle to find it in our own lives.But that’s what civilization asks of people. It asks them to work. Civilization doesn’t let us get away with waiting passively to be told what to think. We have to engage with dialogue and connect with one embodied truth and then another and another. With the invention of dialogue, I realize that your pain is my pain because I am free at last to feel it. And as a participant in the world, as a citizen in this civilization, it is my right and my duty to feel it.It is the act of empathy that teaches us how to be civilized. It is the act of empathy, which the invention of theater taught the people of ancient Greece, that makes civilization possible because it makes democracy possible. If you can learn, through the theater, what it is to leap empathetically out of the tiny circle of your own needs and concerns and enter into the souls of those apparently different from you, then you realize that the sufferings and desires of others are like your own. In theaters, we feel through the human dilemma together, in collaboration and breathing the same air. Here and now, we learn to make it up as we go along with this new knowledge of the connection between us.It’s a strange profession you’ve chosen and no mistake, this alchemical business of what happens when one actor on a stage turns to another. So remember that when you engage in making theater, you are engaging in the business that began it all.You are making civilization."

Ellen McLaughlin, excerpted from her 2009 Commencement Address to the students A.R.T.

Source:http://fluxtheatreensemble.blogspot.com

Building the Stage

2011-09-13T04:47:00.000-07:00

Staging the people (Hotel Grande Bretagne, Athens-Syntagma,1972)
“Building the Stage”Omikron Gallery, 14 Sept-October Nicosia, Cyprus

About the Pool

2011-09-07T13:42:00.000-07:00

The pool was imaginary. The pool came and went away, according to the girl’s moods. It served as the focal point for all her fantasies. She spent whole summers there, languishing in a demure bikini, leafing through fashion magazines and dog-eared coming of age novels. The girl tasted her first beer at the pool; it’s where she practiced losing her virginity. It’s where she sat on early autumn nights, dangling her feet, tracking the moonlight as it moved beneath the water. The pool had a lot to recommend it. It required minimum maintenance. It remained serenely blue in every season, even when the girl forgot its existence. The pool could accommodate any number of guests, any combination of events, but on most days, it held only the girl, and her thoughts, and the slight weight of her desires. The pool bore all these things gracefully. They swirled along its surface, swimming alongside the dead leaves and jaunty flotation devices.

Gillian Devereux

Ou.Un.Po.

2011-09-07T13:29:00.000-07:00

Tassos Vrettos pictures from the Eleusys archaeological site during the collective performance of the Klas Eriksson and the performance by Fatos Ustek and Per Huttner.

"Worlds have a longer life than deeds". Pyndaros

Ouunpo is a three days symposium that will take place in various locations across and around the city of Athens through conventional and non-conventional investigations. The symposium, dedicated to the “oral tradition”, will include performance, round-table discussions, lectures, screenings, visits and walks to various selected sites.

Greece is a country where myths, art, epic and lyrical songs originated from oral tradition and kept alive by travelling poets. This country is also in the limelight due to the current political and economical crisis.
Our visit will be an occasion to investigate the tradition of storytelling and myth as a form of sharing knowledge and performing history, which often stand in opposition to the methodology of institutions. We will try to re-evoke the oral memory of events in contemporary (art) world, with a specific approach to the rituality and the improvisation that are always connected to oral narratives. Performance and initiation to a secret knowledge will be also the objects of our conversations with members of the esoteric milieu and of the masonic lodge.
Inspired by the great religious, theatrical, democratic and artistic traditions of Greece, and in dialogue with local artists, musicians, composers, art historians and curators,we will observe the present moment, and reflect about how a genuine revolutionary movement needs to brake with literal repetition of the past.

Loukia Alavanou, Episodio 3, 2011

To perform something means to interpret it, to betray it, to distort it. Boris Groys affirms that “the opposition between living spirit and dead letter informs the whole traditional Western discourse on religion”, but also on art itself, as embodiment of the creative spirit of change.

The program of the Ouunpo symposium is proposed by Vanessa Theodoropoulou in collaboration with Nadja Argyropoulou.

Members of Ouunpo are : Jacopo Miliani, Meris Angioletti, Raimundas Malasauskas, Marco Pasi, Paola Anziche’, Per Huttner, Alessandra Sandrolini, Yane Calovski, Klas Eriksson, Fatos Ustek, Elena Nemkova, Natasha Rosling, Stephen Whitmarsh.
Invitees of the Symposium are : Georgia Spiropoulos (composer), Sasha Chaitov (MA western esotericism and director of Phoenix Rising Academy) with Iordanis Poulkouras (…), Saprofyta, Marios Chatziprokopiou (artist), Kostantinos Dagritzikos (curator, Six Dogs), Stefanos Rozanis (writer and philosopher), Yianna Tsokou (Professor of Theatrology at the University of Thessaloniki), Chiara Fumai (artist), Nanos Valaoritis (poet and writer).

29th Sept.
Visit to the island of Aegina and to the temple of “Aphaea”.
30 Sept.
Athens, DESTE foundation: Meeting with the poet Nanos Valaoritis and with Stefanos Rozanis, writer and philosopher. Presentation of the project “Saprofyta” by Nadja Argyropoulou (curator of “Hotel Paradies”, Athens Biennial 2009) Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, Malvina Panagiotidi.

Eleusys : Visit to the archaeological site. Collective performance directed by artist Klas Eriksson. Performance by Fatos Ustek and Per Huttner. Artist Marios Chatziprokopiou presents the screening of the film by "Agelatos Petra" by Filippou Koutsaftis. Visit of the temporary exhibitions of Stephen Antonakos and Loukia Alavanou, screening of the work of artists Panagiotis Loukas and Panos Tsagaris.

1rst of Oct.
Athens : Visit to the Greek Masonic Lodge and to its temple. Presentation by Iordanis Poulkouras and Sasha Chaitov, Director of Phoenix Rising Accademy, about "The Eleusinian mysteries through the ages. Initiatory practices in the Western esoteric tradition and their role in modern art and theather".

Panos Tsagaris, 2011.

17.50 Athens, Six Dogs space, in collaboration with curator Kostantinos Dagritzikos: Composer Georgia Spiropoulos will present her work focusing on the relationship between written and oral tradition, on improvisation and composition. She will also introduce us to Yianna Tsokou, Professor of Theatrology at the University of Thessaloniki, with whom she will talk about the ancient Anastenaria rituals. Presentation, discussion and concert.

29 September – 2 October 2011

Holy Mountain (The White Geometry of Winter)

2011-09-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

Model for the Holy Mountain (The White Geometry of Winter) 2011
156 x 105 x 33 cm
wood, acrylic

The Last Word

2011-09-07T12:49:00.000-07:00

Daniel BellDaniel Bell reflects on Friends, Foes, Influences, Ideologies, the State of the Novel, the State of the Union, and the Old Neighborhood.
This interview was conducted on September 21, 2010, a few months before Daniel Bell’s death, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I. Adversaries

Who was your adversary when you were writing The End of Ideology and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism?

I’m not sure there’s a single person. It was more against a whole current of writers, against whole ideological ways of thinking.

It goes very far back, to a crucial personal episode which defined my life when I was in City College. I had joined the Young People’s Socialist League at the age of 13. It’s crazy, but there it is. And I did so for very basic reasons: my father died when I was an infant; my mother raised me; she worked in a factory. There were two seasons in the year — busy and slack. When it was slack, my mother would be home to take care of me. In the busy season, I was in an orphanage. The orphanage was supported by the Jewish community. There were these personal ties that were important.

I grew up on the Lower East Side, which juts out into the river. Before the highways came, there were these long piers. They still remain on the West Side, these long piers. And they had these so-called “Hoovervilles” on the piers, which were tin shacks, and people living there. Everything was in the open. You could see people fornicating, fighting, everything. There were big garbage scowls which turned up, and we’d jump on the top of these to see if there were bits of food. At 11 o’clock at night we’d go to the West Side markets and we’d break open crates, and run away.

Everything was marked out by turf and ethnicity. The Italians were here, the Ukrainian kids were there, the Polish kids were there, the Jewish kids here. And there was “turf.” Before E.O. Wilson, it was about “turf.” We really believed in biological determinism, with every group having its place. There’d be fights. And — this was particularly true of the Polish kids — they’d take potatoes, and put in the potatoes these double-edged razor blades, and throw them at you. A hail of potatoes with razor blades being thrown at you! What you’d do then is you took the top of the garbage cans, and those were our shields. And then our brave socialist women would go on top of the building and throw down hot water to get the kids scattered. And that was life, life on the Lower East Side.

People talk about “rent checks” and such now. About how poor people are because they don’t have enough to get their rent check. In those days, you didn’t have anything like a rent check! We lived in backyard tenements.

So I looked around, and I said to myself: what’s going on here? Twenty percent of the country was unemployed. At that time, there was no social security, there was no government aid of any kind. No unemployment insurance, no old age pensions, nothing. As a kid of thirteen, I figured capitalism was doomed. And so, through a couple of friends, we all became socialists.

Like a number of my young comrades, we in the Young People’s Socialist League were moving towards the Trotskyists. But I had some anarchist cousins who lived in the Mohegan colony which was near Peekskill, and there was a man named Rudolf Rocker, an anarchist. Even though he was gentile, he learned Yiddish. He was the editor of a magazine called the Freie Arbeiter Stimme, the Free Voice of Labor, and my cousin took me to see him. Rocker said to me: “Look, whatever you do, don’t join the Trotskyists.” I said: “Why?” He gave me a book by Alexander Berkman, called The Bolshevik Myth.

Berkman had been deported during the Palmer raids, during World War I. Anarchists went to Russia eagerly because, as they saw it, the anarchists had made the revolution. This wasn’t completely true, but at that time the country was still being led by the Soviets, or workers’ councils. And this is what the anarchists had always wanted: spontaneous movements by workers and peasants. So they went with great expectations.

But by 1921 sailors at Kronstadt were saying: “Look, you promised us free elections. What’s going on here?” And Trotsky said: “This is mutiny.” And that’s that. The sailors said: “We’re the ones who made the revolution in Kronstadt.” And he said: “Stop. I’ll shoot you down.” And Berkman tells this story, day by day.

He was in Kronstadt. He wrote about how he heard shouting, how he heard shots firing. “Trotsky has shot down the Kronstadt sailors! Thousands of bodies, thousands lie in the streets.” The very next day, Trotsky gave a lecture celebrating the Paris Commune. So I could never become a Trotskyist.

And yet I find myself being labeled at the end of my life as an “ex-Trotskyist.” But I was never an ex-Trotskyist — because I was never a Trotskyist!

But when you talked to Irving Howe, or people who were Trotskyites, were you unable to convince them?

We debated. We debated!

There was a group called the Shachtmanites, in City College. It was underground. The Shermanites were a group of radicals besides Irving Howe: [they] included Philip Selznick, the Berkeley academic who died just recently; there was also Irving Kristol. Marty Lipset was there — he took the name Mark Eden. And there was Marty Diamond. He was an extraordinary man who died young, who became a leading Straussian, probably the leading Straussian in American thought. And there was a man named Peter Rossi, and he took a Jewish name, Rosenthal.

There were these debates. I had read a book before the others had, by Robert Michels, called Political Parties. Michels had been a student of Weber and he wrote a famous book which Lipset used in his book on Union Democracy, about the bureaucratic tendency in every organization. That no organization is immune to the bureaucratic tendency. And it targeted the Social Democratic leadership. The Iron Law of Oligarchy. So I would debate Irving Howe, I would say — we would adopt this tone — “And you think, Comrade Sherman, that James P. Cannon is immune to the Iron Law of Oligarchy?” These were my rhetorical smashes against Howe.

Howe was a Commissar at that time. A real Commissar. His real name was Horenstein. My name was Belotsky, originally. And Howe took as his Party name Hugh Ivan. Hugh for the gentleman that he wanted to be … and Ivan for the Muzhik that he was. (Laughs.) Then when he married Arien Mack, he became humanized. Unfortunately, he was later cuckholded and that almost destroyed him.

II. A Liberal Utopian

Are you a utopian?

In a way, I consider myself a utopian. There’s a book I’ve started to write — I’m not sure I’m ever going to finish it — about the historical tension between messianism and utopianism. And it is an attack on messianism. Because I would argue that too many problems of the last two thousand years or so are due to messianism. A messiah has a great vision, usually of redemption. Messianism requires following a leader. It requires pulling everybody into the scheme of a leader. Whereas utopianism basically consists in co-opting people to build things together. There is no overall, overarching scheme.

But the historical difficulty of utopianism is precisely that it doesn’t have a messiah, or a similarly overarching, emotionally powerful actor. So that the tension between utopianism and messianism is frequently to the unfair advantage of the messianic. I believe more and more that if we can have utopian movements we’ll do better than if we have messianic movements.

Is there a place for utopianism in a liberal society?

I think utopianism is a necessary framework. People want some ideals. And that’s why in the book I’m planning the only antagonist to utopianism is messianism. Take the example of what I suspect would be one of the worst examples of messianism — the Jonestown episode, where 700 people simply drank a drug that killed them, at the command of Mr. Jones. The point about messianism is that it always leads to a system of command: you have to follow the messiah. Utopianism has no such system of command. It has only a cooperative imperative: to build.

The problem with utopianism, historically, is that it has a tinge of going back to some presumed ideal. There’s a source of utopianism which is somewhat beautiful in its way, but pulls it back — back to arcadia. Historically, the tension has been between utopianism and arcadia. What I want to do is to say: I don’t want to go from arcadia against messianism. I’d rather have utopianism. So there’s a triangulation there.

But the nineteenth-century utopians — men like Fourier — were not backward-oriented utopians. Were they somehow different?

It depends. Fourier was a madman. A real madman. A brilliant genius of a madman.

The best utopian was Saint-Simon. He had these schemes, these triangular schemes. You know how they Saint-Simonians would get dressed? They dressed with the buttons on the back of their suits. That way, you couldn’t dress yourself. You needed someone to help you. So that’s a wonderful situation, where you are creating communities because you can’t get dressed without them.

What did you take from the Saint-Simonians?

Theories of development. If you look at the theories of development, there are two streams which have never been worked out completely. One is the idea of capitalism, which comes from Marx. The other is industrialism.

The whole stream of “industrial society” begins with Saint-Simon, and from there you have Auguste Comte; then you have the positivism which develops from that, and then in modern times you have Raymond Aron, and finally someone like myself, following from Aron. Instead of capitalism, which in its own way is based upon notions of exploitation, and industrialism, which is based on the idea of technology, one can think of the development of society; of a positive scheme. It is only in the last 50 years or so that the theme of “industrialism” has come forward, and it is largely through the efforts of Aron.

I’m curious to hear you say this, because I don’t see you fitting in with this French line. There’s a deep Weberian pessimism in your work, and a sense of history that seems to owe more to Vico than to these enthusiastic Frenchmen.

That’s completely true. I think you are right that Weber is the lynchpin of my ideas. But no ideas are ever simply lineal. You always have a variety of influences. In a way, the other sort of pole is Durkheim, because Durkheim at bottom had a religious foundation.

III Literature and Politics

We haven’t talked about literature.

Well, I haven’t really kept up with contemporary novels.

But there’s a bunch in your office upstairs.

No one writes today about the larger element of society. Not Paul Auster, not any of the others. Everything is a falling away from the whole emphasis of social realism. But this is a pulling away.

Take this new book of Franzen’s. At the most it is about the family, and the hidden tensions within a family.

It is interesting that with the collapse of the psychological movement you get more emphasis on psychology. But no one talks about society anymore. Instead they talk about human rights. Because human rights then covers everything. The problem with human rights is that it doesn’t have boundaries.

Isn’t that Hannah Arendt’s criticism?

Hannah is a more complicated element. I knew her very well, particularly during the year I spent at Chicago. But I would say that Hannah’s book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was wrong. Very few societies have ever been totalitarian, at least for long. You can’t simply smash everything. There’s always something left. No society can ever live that way.

The one thing the theory of totalitarianism never confronted is the family. People live by the family, and there’s no mention of families in The Origins of Totalitarianism. So that the idea that you smash a society… — but she changed her mind, interestingly enough, during the Hungarian Revolution. If you look at the introduction to the reissue of the book, you’ll see she changed her mind.

You speak very affectionately about communities and families, in particular of the ones you grew up in. Were you ever attracted to the communitarians?

Well, not in the way communitarians have developed. When I think of communitarianism, I think of two people. I think of Amitai Etzioni and Michael Sandel. As I used to say to Michael: “The trouble with your view is that I’m a Jew. And your communitarianism never mentions the right of Jews to be Jews.”

We’re a community, and yet the communitarian movement exists with respect to a national polity. And by existing in relation to a national polity, it tends to put aside the particularity of real communities, like the Jewish community. So communitarianism to me has always seemed an abstract option. And to the extent that it is a doctrine, it is related to a national polity, so that… — to some extent this reflects my anarchist background, that I want to diminish the national polity. Abolish it as a polity, not as an economy. I’ve written, as you probably know, that I’m a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.

And you’ve never had any trouble reconciling those?

Not in the least! I’m against the idea of totality, which is a whole Marxist concept. I believe there are different logics in the different realms. The economy is, more or less, a system in which interdependence is established through the different variables of supply and demand. The polity is not a system, it is an order, held together by coercion and consent. Culture has two dimensions. One is the dimension of forms that exist, and the other is the dimension of meanings.

Two things broke me away from Marxism. One is the fact that if you look at the great historic religions, going back to what Jaspers called the Axial Age, the cores are still recognizable today — Judaism, Christianity, Confucianism. Economies have disappeared, political empires have crumbled, yet the greatest religions remain. The question is: how can this be, if the mode of production determines the superstructure? How come they remain? So to me, the very nature of these great historic religions is a repudiation of Marxism.

The second is the idea of substructure and superstructure — the idea that the substructure determines the superstructure. Well, that’s silly. Look at Germany from the eighteenth century to the present. You have a Wilhelmine Empire, a Federal Republic, you have a Nazi period, you have the new Federal Republic — yet the substructure is basically still capitalist. Now how can that be? How, on a Marxist view, can you have a single substructure and yet such a variety of superstructures?

Ok, so the realms may be autonomous. But do you not think they are intimately related? In Cultural Contradictions, you write of how America’s crumbling cultural values threaten the economic realm.

Let me go back for a minute because this is crucial. If there’s no single dimension that runs across these different realms, then what is so special about them? I’m a socialist in economics because I believe that every human being has a right — if you want to put it that way — to a decent living standard. It goes back to Aristotle. If a man is not a member of the polity, he is either a beast or a God. So that there ought to be a “right” to give everybody a decent standard of living. Being a member of the society gives rise to a claim on the economy.

I’m a liberal in politics because I believe in merit. And I therefore believe that one’s position in society ought to be determined on the basis of merit.

In culture, I’m a conservative because I believe in judgment, forms, and meanings.

So that’s why I can assume a certain logical coherence to the idea of being a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.

But in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism you precisely describe a contradiction between an economy that requires people to work and to save, and a cultural ethic that tells people to enjoy leisure, and to consume.

Well, here there is a contradiction between production and consumption. Go back to the original theories of Weber. Capitalism requires delayed gratification, savings, not going into debt, saving up for tomorrow. Whereas a modern society is a consumer society.

The beginning of the story of capitalism in the last century is a story of the 1920s. It was invented by a man named Paul Mazer. It is called the installment plan. Instead of saving up for it, you can get it now and pay later. This is an invitation to expand the market.

So there are always these little contradictions. Nothing is ever seamless. That’s one of the problems with the Catholic Church — it believes everything is seamless.

Do you think that in some ways the present financial crisis has vindicated your theory? Public and private debt in the United States are now three times GDP …

The financial crisis violates the most fundamental theorem of Weber: the only time that you go into debt is if you buy land in order to buy a house. But you can’t go into debt for other things. So that this tension of savings versus debt has always been there.

In this country, for the last 10-15 years or more, there’s been almost no savings. You go into debt. The debt was leveraged, because the notion was that house prices would always go up. One of the problems with the foreclosure thing today is that no one knows how many people speculated and flipped. If 10 per cent of people bought a house on speculation, with the idea of flipping it, they are stuck. And that’s a typical thing, if you try to deal with the issue of foreclosures: these people were buying just to flip it. So why the hell should you save them? No one had the courage to say: “Let’s see how many people bought extra houses to flip them.”

But the real question is: how can people, very smart people at Goldman Sachs and others, go on with the idea that you can leverage a whole society? They are living by leverage, and not realizing that there is a simple law in statistics: that we have a growth pattern that is an S curve. It goes up, and then you reach a midpoint, when it begins to come down. All these people are mathematical. So they’d have to say: “Hey, how can this thing keep going up?”

The answer, I suspect, is that enough people behind the scenes are saying: “That’s how I’ll make my money, at their expense. I’ll get out in time!” But they themselves then got trapped.

I have a former father-in-law, through a previous marriage, who wanted me to come into the family business. His name is Benjamin Graham. Benjamin Graham, you probably know, was the founder of value analysis. He said: “I have a bright young man here, named Warren Buffett. I’ll pair you with Warren Buffett!” And I said, Ben, the problem is, I have no stomach for the “timing,” and that’s crucial in this business. Well, anyhow, I worked for Ben, and I made some money with it. I do understand the markets.

IV. Past and Future

You used to serve on the Commission on the Year 2000. Some of that work came through in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which was really futurology: looking forward and trying to predict where society will be in 20 or 30 years.

There’s a misunderstanding to some extent, which is probably my fault. The Commission on the Year 2000, when I was involved in organizing it, was never really interested in the future. There is something called the Encyclopedia of the Future, which came out of a group in Washington, for which I wrote a long essay, attacking the idea of the future.

You mean attacking futurology?

Attacking futurology, yes, and in particular attacking Alvin Toffler, and what I called “future shlock.” (Laughs.)

There are two problems with futurology. One is that no one can do prediction. Why? Because predictions are point events, and you never know the internal dynamics. I think of my erstwhile colleague Zbigniew Brzezinski, with whom I taught at Columbia. During a debate on television he was asked: “Professor Brzezinski, are you a Kremlinologist?” And he said: “Well, if you like, though it is an ugly word.” “So you are someone who studies the Soviet Union? If so, Professor Brzezinski, how come you failed to predict the ouster of Khrushchev?” And Zbig said: “Tell me: if Khrushchev couldn’t predict his own ouster, how do you expect me to do it?!”

So you can’t predict. What you can do is deal with structural change. If you move from an agricultural to an industrial economy then there are obvious changes you have to make in the educational system, and various other places. That’s why I make a distinction between prediction and forecasting.

The other problem is that we weren’t interested in the future, per se. We were interested in the fact that once you make a decision it becomes binding and lays out the lines for the next time period. If you build a city, and build it on a grid pattern, then it becomes a constraint on how you build in the future. Whether you build in a circular pattern or a grid pattern affects the lives of people in the future. So we’re not only interested in forecasting the future, but in saying: let’s pay attention to how we make decisions now, because they are going to affect our legacy in the future.

What do you make of the confrontation between rival forms of capitalism, between state—directed capitalism in China, and whatever it is we have in the West?

Well, the story of the West begins in 1453.

The fall of Constantinople?

Yes, the fall of Constantinople. Good for you. (Laughter.)

What the fall of Constantinople meant was a shift to the Atlantic littoral. Holland, England, Spain, and Portugal became the main actors.

Now, there are certain kinds of large-scale, cyclical elements. In the nineteenth century, to the extent that there is any single indicator, and it is a difficult one, it would be steel. England based its industrial revolution on steel, and on the availability of coal. Eventually the United States overtook Britain on steel, and we became dominant. And then Japan, and Korea, who were able to undercut us on price. The only way you can avoid that, the way the Italians avoided some of it, is to move to specialized and niche production, as opposed to mass production. The Italians lost out on textiles, but then they began to specialize in a niche market, as did Benetton and others.

When the Russians managed to increase their productivity it was for the same reason the Chinese are now increasing their productivity: the movement of people off the land and into cities. The urbanization process. The Chinese have these huge internal migrant populations. Now, of course, the Chinese are beginning to get worried about countries like Vietnam undercutting them in turn.

So these large-scale shifts are taking place, and we’ve lost out almost completely. What we have to do is either go into niche production, or find new areas. I think in the next 20-30 years, maybe longer, space will be a major area, undersea resources, biology, some elements of basic research.

I think the U.S. is in a difficult position. The recent recession is a blip. It is a consequence of overleveraging, speculation and so on — but it doesn’t really have anything to do with the fundamental structural problems confronting this society.

The recession was a blip?

It might not have been a blip. The financial system is responsible for shifting money into resources. It overdid that, and failed. The question is whether you can really recreate a viable financial system. But all of that is secondary.

The real issue for leadership is that very few people pay attention to fundamental structural changes. We can identify fundamental structural changes, and that is the only defense we have against cyclical changes.

But in this country now, unfortunately, nobody really looks at trying to find out what the historic precedents and trends might tell us. There is no sense of history in these matters.

Daniel Bell was a sociologist and Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He served as managing editor of The New Leader (1941–1945), labor editor of Fortune (1948–1958) and later co-editor (with Irving Kristol) of The Public Interest (1965–1973). Among his best-known books are The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of a Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). His book, The Reforming of General Education: The Columbia Experience in Its National Setting, has recently been republished by Transaction with a new introduction.
Roberto Foa is a PhD Candidate at Harvard University.
Thomas Meaney is an editor of The Utopian

Source: www.the-utopian.org, February 10th, 2011.

Space Makes a Dark Glow

2011-09-04T13:09:00.000-07:00

the night hawk tears air

wings a star wing crescent

horizon's breath

a body dreams sky in

aperture of mind

retina of stars inhaled air

a subtle voice of wind exhaled

ascension into

silence birdsong

cadence pulse a flickering

I wrap my voice behind

stars beam in shapes I cannot

name ways in I cannot say

sun arcs round

contour
rest stone breathes

measured breaths

half shapes around reeds

shadow a stream braids

currents form light into seams

I read your shadow by those stems

a stream braids

reflections of stars

fade round stones

moment of moment

filled memory with ink

poured the universe

in other eyes

Rico Moore

Model for a Tribune that was Never Built

2011-08-28T07:16:00.001-07:00

Model for a Tribune that was Never
Built
2011
wood, cement rock, acrylic
50 x 20 x 13 cm

Melanchotopia

2011-08-28T07:13:00.000-07:00

Witte de With’s Melanchotopia is an exhibition that invites more than forty international artists to work with different venues in the city-center of Rotterdam – places where people live and work – and to activate their potential as spaces for ideas, discourse and invention.

From large-scale interventions to very simple gestures, Melanchotopia supports a range of artistic practices that go beyond the classical approach to displaying art in public space. Working with the existing dynamics of the city, Witte de With’s intention is to bring forward the diverse layers of daily life in Rotterdam, creating a rich framework for subjective encounters. It is an exhibition about the reality of Rotterdam.

Today, Rotterdam seems to be on hold between its past and its future: filled with nostalgia for the pre-WWII city and in wait for the utopian future, which is perpetually stalled in unfinished developments and reconstructions. Projections about yesterday and tomorrow drive the image of the city, that seems to lack a present. Melanchotopia performs the present of the city through the specific practice of each artist.

Over the course of the exhibition Witte de With’s galleries will be reconfigured to become the epicenter of Melanchotopia. The projects, which spread throughout Rotterdam’s center, are brought together via a graphic mapping. Besides its new function as an information center, Witte de With will be equipped with a designed bookshop and an auditorium dedicated to a sideprogram of lectures and artist talks. Here you can buy the exhibition guide with Melanchotopia map. The comprehensive educational program provides guided tours, art encounters and a special audio tour.

The Melanchotopia logo is a hybrid composition of Witte de With’s own cloud by Gerard Hadders (Hard Werken) and the Melanchotopia-rain of Sarah Morris, arranged by Markus Weisbeck (Surface).

Artists
Michael van den Abeele, Saâdane Afif, Harold Ancart, Danaï Anesiadou, Sven Augustijnen, Dirk Bell, Michael Beutler, Guillaume Bijl, Pierre Bismuth, Monica Bonvicini, George van Dam, Thea Djordjadze, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Olivier Foulon, Murray Gaylard, Filip Gilissen, Adam Gillam, Arnoud Holleman, Adrià Julià, Leon Kahane, Erik van Lieshout, Minouk Lim, Sarah Morris, Alex Morrison, Kate Newby, Ricardo Okaranza, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Nina Pohl, Tomo Savi-Gecan, Markus Schinwald, Slavs and Tatars, Mårten Spångberg, Tobias Spichtig, Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi, Zin Taylor, Harald Thys & Jos De Gruyter, Octavian Trauttmansdorff, Kostis Velonis, Lidwien van de Ven, Peter Wächtler, Lawrence Weiner.

Curated by
Nicolaus Schafhausen and Anne-Claire Schmitz
Curatorial assistants: Thomas Cuckle, Amira Gad, Fabian Schoeneich and Sam Sterckx.

Grand Opening
Friday 2 September 2011, starting from 1 p.m. till late
Witte de With Contemporary Art Center, Rotterdam.
Source:www.wdw.nl

Giraffe and Anti-Giraffe: Charles Fourier’s Artistic Thinking

2011-08-28T06:58:00.001-07:00

1. After the War

The writings of Charles Fourier (1772–1837) are a glorious fuck you to all that exists. Yet they are neither punk’s provocation nor the apodictic objectivity of Marxian dialectics, but an enculage of civilization through the filigree work of total world reinvention.

Marx complained that Fourier’s utopia was all in his mind, that he was obliged to construct a new society “with elements supplied by his brain” because capitalist production was underdeveloped when he wrote.1 But it is perhaps this appeal to reason rather than history that makes Fourier’s imagination so radical. Even today, it has not been bought and sold: there is still nothing that surpasses Fourier’s projected state of absolute Harmony.

For André Breton, who claimed Fourier for Surrealism in his poem Ode á Charles Fourier (1947), only minds as febrile and immoral as Fourier’s could possess the “extreme freshness” necessary to re-imagine the world in the aftermath of destruction: “Fourier they’ve scoffed but one day they’ll have to try your remedy whether they like it or not …”2 Breton was the first to consult Fourier after World War II, echoing the time when Fourier himself was writing in the early nineteenth century, in a Europe that had similarly collapsed in wars. There was not much available in his historical present that one could appeal to.

Laurent Pelletier, The dreamt Phalanstère of Charles Fourier, 1868. Watercolor on paper.

According to Fourier, the world is cosmically out of whack. He blamed the arrogance of the philosophers and the charlatanism of priests for having systematically repressed the passions, leaving humankind stuck in an incoherent civilized state for 2300 years. Faced with this universal misery, Fourier heralds the triumphant reign of a Harmonian cosmic order based in his science of Passional Attraction—the primordial, ubiquitous force that connects the whole in social series.3 According to this order, government must be based on a consultation of the passions since they essentially characterize the human being and its community. Conversely, a repression of the passions will result in hypocritical social institutions like marriage and the nuclear family, from which Fourier argued that women must be freed—and in fact, Fourier took the proto-feminist view that the measure of happiness was the degree of independence of women in society.

In Harmony, communal living will be the order of the day and will be organized in micro-societies called Phalansteries, founded on collective sensuousness and industry. According to Fourier’s group theory, each Phalanstery would be populated by 1620 people—one male and one female for each of the 810 temperaments Fourier recognized. This combination would enable infinite social, aesthetic, and sexual encounters, through which humankind would regain its equilibrium. It is “schlaraffisch eingerichtet” (Benjamin; “furnished like an El Dorado”), and even pleasures—hunting, fishing, gardening, playing music and theatre, staging operas—are to be rewarded. The children organize themselves in Little Hordes where they raise each other and contribute to the everyday life of the Phalanstery. The social series of temperaments, generations, and divisions of labor describe subgroups and passionate inclinations that work in complex ways across the collectivity, resulting in a communal euphoria, a constant social high. In Fourier’s famous phrase, “the passions are proportional to the destinies.” Forget about genital love: society is erogenous, and Fourier’s scorn for the doubt of the Cartesian subject is endless.4

The Familiestère Godin was constructed between 1856-1859, by the industrial entrepreneur, Jean-Baptiste-André Godin inspired by the ideas of Fourier and Saint-Simon. As a social experiment, work facilities were linked to a communal settlement, equipped with all the necessary amenities: residential buildings, a pool, cooperative stores, a garden, a nursery, schools and a theatre (the temple of the Familistère community). This experiment lasted in cooperative form until 1968.

Harmony will bring about vast improvements, genetically and socially. In keeping with the redemption of its Harmonian birthright, humankind will mutate and over nine generations will reach an average height of seven feet and a life expectancy of 144 years. There will be plenitude on all levels. The Earth’s original five moons will be restored and its polar tilt corrected, and the oceans will have lemonade flavoring as the poles become ice-free by 1828. Constantinople is set to be the world capital and planet Earth will be crowned by a permanent aurora borealis. Fourier, a theoretical hedonist if there ever was one, also develops an entire gastrosophie that involves the gratification of all of our 810 senses (again 810!), trumping the common understanding that there are only five. Likewise, food is a cosmic vision, a “psychedelic gastronomy!” as the editor of the first Danish translation exults.5

If all this sounds far out, then consider Fourier’s margin of error: all his calculi, he writes in Theory of the Four Movements (1808), are subject to the exception of a fraction of an eighth or a ninth:

This is always to be understood, even when I do no mention it. For instance, if I say as a general thesis, civilised man is very miserable, this means that seven-eights, or eight-ninths of them are reduced to a state of misery and privation, and that only one-eighth escapes the general misfortune and enjoys a lot that can be envied.6

This margin of error can perhaps also be applied to Fourier’s own brand of radical Enlightenment thinking: if he argues in favor of the emancipation of slaves and women, his anti-Semitism, his prejudiced view of the Chinese, and his hatred of the English show the darker sides of his thinking.

Fourier cannot be taken seriously. This is exactly the power of his text against any esprit de sérieux. With his blatant inventions and inconsistencies, his writings are ridiculous, too much. Roland Barthes called Fourier’s science “overmuch,” and considered his work as a kind of literary practice. “Never was a discourse happier,” wrote Barthes, for it describes a new social order articulated on excess, bedazzlement, and, in Fourier’s own words, the “need to protect everything we call vice.”7 Barthes writes with fascination on Fourier’s “vomiting of politics” in a “vast madness which does not end, but which permutates.”8 As Adorno summed it up, “if it can be said about anybody, then these lines apply to Fourier: ‘a fool leaves the world, and it remains stupid’”9 Benjamin, more politely, took a Nietzschean angle: “Fourier is more of an inventor than a savant.”10

2. Love of Lesbians and the Sound of Absolutely Positive Truth

Fourier’s happy discourse also relates to a systematization and practical application of his radical imagination. He was neither a mysticist nor a reformist or a revolutionary. Contrary to his reception by Marx and other socialist thinkers, he did not consider himself a utopian. Harmony does not demand work and sacrifice, but is rather the inevitable outcome of scientifically-adjusted human behavior. His controversial views on the permissive, innovative character of sexual practices—including homosexual, polygamous, extra-marital, manic, and “omnigamous”—were thus a purely scientific appreciation of one way of moving toward new social structures. (Fourier himself was prone to an ambivalent extra-mania he termed “Sapphienisme” whereby he was a lover and protector of lesbians and promoted their wellbeing. He assessed to be among about 26,400 companions worldwide with similar ideas.)

In this sense, the aim of science is simply to harness Passional Attraction as a cosmic source of energy and to bring mankind within the ordered domain of Passional Gravitation. Thus, Fourier’s socialism is not what ought to be (the essence of Marxian socialism, according to Marcuse), but what will be—naturally, rationally, and without revolution—as soon as our passions are realized socially; as soon as we are tuned in correctly, as it were, to a social space that in Fourier is reconfigured and proportioned harmonically.

The optimism of Enlightenment philosophers was often legitimized by utilitarian application. Truth—that in Fourier is “absolutely positive” (Blanchot)—was the practical task of helping humanity to become humanity, through the eradication of illness, poverty, ignorance, and so forth. The Phalanstery thus provided the ground for the commonsensical applicability of Fourier’s argument. Moreover, utilitarianism rejects the ranking of (moral) value according to a priori criteria in favor of the equal validity of each person’s own search for happiness and pleasure. Fourier, to be sure, accepts and celebrates the subjective multi-directionality of vanity, passion, and inclination. To him, one must embrace the delights of contrast, competition, and rivalry on the level of the individual and social series: in Harmony, Industrial Armies roam the world and compete in aesthetic battles to build large-scale engineering projects, cook the most delicious pie, or stage the most impressive opera. Thus Fourier’s anti-conformist God resides over a Combined Order whose permanent social revelation consists in variety and complexity—difference in age, fortune, ability, temperament. In the 1960s, the hippies would sum up such undogmatic tolerance with the slogan “do your own thing.” Let the pleasure principle rule. Don’t moralize, don’t pathologize.

Of course, Fourier also had a theory for the history of the entire world. His cosmogony is a theory of the “ages of happiness,” which explains the progress and decay of civilization in ascending and descending vibrations, together comprising eighty thousand years and thirty-two social metamorphoses, after which humankind will cease to exist. The ascending and descending vibrations serve to “pattern” movements between different stages of individual and historical being, corresponding to the progression from youth to decrepitude in the human life span. The musical analogy is elaborated in the way Fourier organizes the subject’s passions and senses as a keyboard with thirty-two keys. Like the passions are a keyboard, for example, so is the Sun surrounded by a claviature of planets arranged in octaves; thus social change on Earth will influence the entire solar system and affect the planetary orbits positively. This ties in Fourier’s theories with the ancient Pythagorean and Renaissance beliefs in an affinity between natural law and divine law, between the harmony of the passions and the harmony of the spheres.11

Engraving of A Perfumer's Dress

In 1814, Fourier discovers the Aromal Fluid, a medium for the great chain of being, a connection between the Earth and the rest of the universe.12 The Aromal Fluid (or Aromal Movement) is a “system for the distribution of known or unknown aromas, which control men and animals, form the seeds of winds and epidemics, govern the sexual relations of the planets and provide the seeds of created species.”13 He notes that, “if everything is connected in the system of the universe, there must exist a means of communicating between creatures of the other world and this.” This means of communication is the Aromal Fluid, the supersensible exhalation of the planets. It is an exemplary vital matter: a single, all-pervasive, imperceptible substance—a bit like capital in our present cosmogony, we can say; a universal middleman.

In Fourier’s cosmic order, the world is folded in upon itself in analogies mirroring the principles that constitute it (with octaves, harmonies, planetary orbits, and so on). It has no messianic horizon because it is held together by divine, mathematical laws—geometrical principles that contain parcels of all states of being, including their respective polarities and all ambivalent and transitional forms, and that are only complete in the totality of their variety and infinite multiplicity. Every moment in a geometric time-space corresponds to myriad events that are distributed across a plane defined by cycles, scales, and symmetries.

In the few remarks that he made on Fourier, Maurice Blanchot deconstructs the status of desire in the former’s system. To Blanchot, the “strange gift” of Passional Attraction is a “passion without desire.”14 Where desire is that of an individual subject, of a sovereign “I” that affirms the law that it destroys in the consumption of a transgressive desire, a passion without desire—measured, non-erotic, yet obliging the entire universe to modify itself—never coincides with pleasure, even if pleasure is one of its moments. Blanchot’s reading implies that cosmic happiness goes beyond the individual human subject: instead, Passional Attraction becomes a tendency that rises into the non-time of 80,000 years of ascending and descending vibrations toward universal harmony and sympathetic fusion within the given order of the cosmic household.15 Fourier’s harmonial vibration is the cosmic timbre of a higher pattern to which the soul is already attuned.

Max Ernst, Une semaine de bonté, 1936. Graphic novel.

3. Fourier as a Way of Life

Fourier’s vision for communal living, liberated sexuality, and cosmic harmony resonated with countercultural, “tribal” emancipation and holistic utopian projects of the 1960s, such as Buckminster Fuller’s “spaceship earth” and Martin Luther King’s “beloved community.”16 After his writings were republished in France in 1966–68, commentaries and new translations sprang up across Europe and his work was almost obligatorily referenced in critical writing at the time, as well as and in architecture, with the Phalanstery being an inspiration for Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation (1947–52). In art and counterculture, Fourier's work had an at least a spectral presence, as in Constant’s New Babylon, the mandatory daily exchange of sex partners in Otto Mühl’s Aktionsanalytische Organisation, or in the name of the Danish student and youth organization Det Ny Samfund (“New Society”). In general, Fourier’s conjoint theorization of labor and love dovetailed with the many post-World War II attempts at thinking Marx and Freud together.

As Fourier’s teachings had been sporadically realized in communes in Europe, North America, and South America in the nineteenth century, so was there also the psychedelic Phalanstery. As members of the San Francisco commune Togetherness explained to Dominique Desanti in the late sixties, “We are Fourierists.”17 Asked whether they have actually read Fourier they reply, “we’ve been told.” Theirs is “Un Fourier par ouï-dire,” infused with elements of Gandhism, concocted in a mix of memory and invention that in itself is quite Fourierian. Still, the members of the commune remain faithful to Fourierian pillars of faith such as the inclusion of children in production, the division of the working day into two-hour shifts, and the integration of male and female tasks. Visitors have told the members of Togetherness that Fourier condoned the use of drugs as an adjuvant or stimulant, and they sell the handicraft of the commune in the Haight-Asbury district: “ex-hippie-capital turned into necropolis, where the bourgeois come to watch the post-hippies, drugged to the point of drifting away, voluntary onlookers, the foam of a broken wave.”18 While Fourier’s nineteenth-century followers tended to underplay or even censor his emphasis on the unrestrained development of desire, it seems that his resurgence in sixties’ collectivism was focused on exactly the Dionysian aspects of his socialism. Accordingly, Togetherness was built on the rule of love, and its denizens embraced Passional Attraction in an amour diffus that included lesbian and gay relationships, and in which orgies, instituted by Fourier as a superior form of love, is an act of principle. In Desanti’s micropolitical turn of phrase, the drop-outs of Togetherness have found “their universal love, a total tolerance of minoritarian and singular tendencies.”19

By 1969, Togetherness suffers a meteoric decline and is dissolved by its members. The former communards choose social revolt as their next endeavor, in factions of post-Proudhonism, post-Marxism, post-Leninism, or “para-Maoism.” Even in its collapse, Fourierism generates difference. Short-lived as it was, the example of Togetherness during the Summer of Love seems to refute Benjamin’s claim that “only in the summery middle of the nineteenth century, only under its sun, can one conceive of Fourier’s fantasy materialized.”20 Writing in 1969, Roland Barthes predicted the decline of the Fourierist commune,

Could we imagine a way of living that was, if not revolutionary, at least unobstructed? No one since Fourier has produced this image: no figure has yet been able to surmount and go beyond the militant and the hippy. The militant continue to live like a petty bourgeois, and the hippy like an inverted bourgeois; between these two, nothing. The political critique and the cultural critique don’t seem to be able to coincide.21

Similarly, to Herbert Marcuse it is also close but no cigar with Charles Fourier. In his Eros and Civilization (1955) Marcuse notes that, “Fourier comes closer than any other utopian socialist to elucidating the dependence of freedom on non-repressive sublimation.”22 But the nature of Fourier’s idea is based on the repressive elements of “a giant organization and administration,” which for Marcuse risks fascism, for the working communities of the Phalanstery “anticipate ‘strength through joy’ rather than freedom, the beautification of mass culture rather than its abolition.” To accuse Fourier of aestheticizing politics seems to rationalize his work through the historical knowledge of a totalitarian modernity. In the mid-twentieth century, however, it was no doubt inevitable to comment on the fascist connotations of the Phalanstère. (Or maybe it was simply a question of irreconcilable temperaments between Marcuse, the well-intentioned utopianist schoolteacher and Fourier the “delirious cashier,” as Flaubert called him.)

Also other post-World War II thinkers were uncertain as to whether Fourier’s imaginative intoxication could be reclaimed for critical purposes. While his work was eagerly referenced, it remained exotic if not intractable; thus Kenneth White asks whether Fourierism is of “any interest to us in the present historical conjecture, or whether it is to be placed, once and for all, as a particularly grotesque item, for dilettante admiration and curiosity, on the shelf of political antiquities.”23 Fourier never quite fit history, yet his happy discourse is a specter that seems to trans-illuminate any given historical moment as an x-ray of that which is not, but exists anyway because it can be imagined.

Fourier wasn’t read only as a “vomiting of politics,” but also as a regurgitation of psychoanalysis. His philosophy was in a sense already anti-Oedipal, corresponding to Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that desires don’t belong to the realm of the imaginary, and are never transformed through desexualization or sublimation. Once sexuality is conceived as a force of production in its own right (the unconscious as a worker), it escapes restriction into narrow cells of family, couple, person, object. “Sexuality is everywhere,” Deleuze and Guattari wrote, recalling Fourier’s “vibrations and flows” to evoke how libidinal energy proceeds directly to the entire social field:

For the prime evidence points to the fact that desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures—an always nomadic and migrant desire, characterized first of all by its “gigantism”: no one has shown this more clearly than Charles Fourier.24

As a result, and as per Fourier, “we always make love with worlds”—which is, in fact, a good definition of artistic thinking: to make love with worlds—nothing less.

Franscisco Goya, The Witches' Sabbath, 1797-98. Oil on canvas.
4. Giraffe, Reindeer, Dog

Planetary lovemaking makes us recognize strange signs in civilization. According to Fourier, the hieroglyph of truth is the giraffe:

The hieroglyph of truth in the animal kingdom is the giraffe. Since the characteristic of truth is to surmount error, the animal that represents it must be able to raise his head higher than all the others: this the giraffe can do, as it browses on branches 18 feet above the ground. It is, in the words of one ancient author, “a most fine animal, gentle and agreeable to the eye.” Truth is also most fine, but as it is incapable of harmonizing with our customs, its hieroglyph, the giraffe, must be incapable of helping humans in their work; thus God has reduced it to insignificance by giving it an irregular gait which shakes up and damages any burden it might be called upon to bear. As a result we prefer to leave it to inaction, just as nobody will employ a truthful man, whose character runs counter to all accepted customs and desires.25

Fourier reasons that just like truth is only beautiful when it is inactive, so the giraffe is only admirable when it is at rest. With this analogy he proves that God created nothing without a purpose—even the giraffe, which is supremely useless. Thus, if one wishes to know what purposes it will serve in societies other than Civilization, one can study this problem in the “counter-giraffe,” the reindeer. A creature that only lives in hostile climates, the reindeer is “an animal which provides us with every service imaginable: you will see that God has excluded it from those social climates, from which truth will also be excluded for as long as Civilization lasts.”26 Fourier continues,

And when the societary order has enabled us to become adept at the use of truth and the virtues which are excluded from our lives at present, a new creation will provide us, in the anti-giraffe, with a great and magnificent servant whose qualities will far surpass the good qualities of the reindeer, which so excites our envy and arouses our anger at nature for having deprived us of it.27

Fourier’s delirious parable will get us nowhere near objectivity and consensus, yet it in its irreducibility it circumscribes the absence of truth. As we wait for this fantastic animal—the anti-giraffe—to arrive, we can delectate its profoundly aesthetic incongruence with all that exists, its devastating power of counter-actualization. If one wants a social aesthetic, then this is it: all that Fourier’s philosophical system talks about is the social, yet it can never be socialized, never become one with society, never become operational or ameliorative. Power will never be able to use Fourier to heal the miseries it has created. More than 200 years after Fourier wrote his first book, at a time when art is encroached by economy like never before, this fact alone seems more important than ever for the thinking and the making of art.

If we were to consider Fourier’s text a blueprint for a new life-world then we will, melancholically, get sucked back into the Real that we can never master. Just think of the personal misery of Charles, who each day at noon waited for the patron who would sponsor the realization of one of his Phalansteries, but who never arrived; who dreamt of gastronomic orgies but ate bad food his entire life; who was found dead kneeling by his bed in his old frock-coat… Instead, if contemporary life appeals to none of your 810 senses, one can take a hit of the perverse systematic of Fourier’s Harmony to invigorate sensing and speculation. “It was all in the mind,” said Marx of Fourier—but so is any other theory, institution, and discourse that reproduces the world. Most of all, reading Fourier today is a perfect anachrony to capital’s pre-emption of the future through calculated responses in the present. Even (or especially) capital will never catch up to this. It is a text that tops off all the absurdities that we are being served, by economy and politics alike, revealing them not as false and theatrical, but as gnomic and forlorn—incapable of touching Fourier’s divine and unapologetic bullshit that makes you defenseless, lifts you up and sets you free.

Adorno and Horkheimer write that in the culture industry, imagination goes to the dogs. Not so in Fourier. Here we always make love with worlds.

×

Notes
1 Marx quoted from Kenneth White, Introduction to Ode to Charles Fourier by André Breton, trans. Kenneth White (London: Cape Goliard/Grossman, 1969).

2 André Breton: Selections, ed. Mark Polizzotti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 32.

3 In Fourier there are twelve passions common to everybody. The five “luxurious” passions (that correspond to the five senses) tend toward luxury, pleasure, the formation of groups and affective ties. The four cardinal, affective passions—friendship, ambition, love and “familism”—concern relationships with others; and finally the three “distributive or mechanizing” passions, the Cabalist, the Butterfly, and the Composite that have to do with calculation and organization of pleasurable work. The twelve passions combine in a thirteenth super-passion, Unityism, that rules the Destinies for all time. This is the “inclination of the individual to harmonize everything around him and of the whole human race … it is a boundless philanthropy, a universal well-being,” the comprehension of the whole. Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, eds. Gareth Stedman Jones, Ian Patterson (1808; Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1996), 81.

4 Walter Benjamin, “Fourier,” (c.1940), in Das Passagen-Werk (Berlin: Suhrkamp), 792.

5 Michael Helm, introduction to Stammefællesskabet by Charles Fourier (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1972).

6 Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, 34.

7 Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, 72. To Barthes, Fourier is a “logothet,” the founder of a new discourse whose social inventions are facts of writing. Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), 83.

8 Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, 88.

9 Theodor Adorno, forward to Theorie der vier Bewegungen und der allgemeinen Bestimmungen by Charles Fourier, trans. Gertrud von Holzhausen (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1966), 5.

10 Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 775.

11 For Joscelyn Godwin, Fourier’s cosmogony is “as traditional as could be” viewed from the point of a Pythagorean tradition. See Joscelyn Godwin, The Harmony of the Spheres. A Sourcebook of the Pythagorean Tradition in Music (Rochester, VA: Inner Traditions, 1993), 357. Unlike Godwin, Benjamin holds that “Man muss sich klar machen, dass Fouriers Harmonien auf keiner der überkommenen Zahlenmysterien beruhren, wie dem pythagoräischen oder dem keplerschen. Sie sind gar aus ihm selber herausgesponnen und sie geben der Harmonie etwas Unnahbares und Bewahrtes: sie umgeben die harmoniens gleichsam mit Stacheldraht. Le bonheur du phalanstère es tun bonheur barbelé.” (Das Passagen-Werk, 785–6).

12 Fourier’s Theory of The Four Movements covers the social (or passionate), animal (or instinctive), organic and material movements.

13 Fourier, Theory of The Four Movements, 16.

14 Maurice Blanchot, “En guise d’introduction” Topique, 4–5 (October, 1970), 8.

15 Barthes talks about the domesticity of utopia: “The area of need is Politics, the area of Desire is what Fourier calls Domestics. Fourier has chosen Domestics over Politics, he has constructed a domestic utopia (but can a utopia be otherwise? Can a utopia be political? Isn’t politics: every language less one, that of Desire? … Politics is what forecloses desire, save to achieve it in the form of neurosis: political neurosis or, more exactly: the neurosis of politicizing.” Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola, 85.

16 Linda Sargent Wood discusses holistic world views in the postwar era and how their influence peaked in the sixties; apart from Fuller and King, she discusses Rachel Carson, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Esalen Institute. Linda Sargent Wood, A More Perfect Union. Holistic World Views and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

17 “Ex-capitale hippie devenue nécropole oú les bourgeois viennent contempler des post-hippies, drogués á la dérive, figurants volontaires, écume d’une vague brisée” Dominique Desanti, “San Francisco: Des hippies pour Fourier,” Topique, 4–5 (October, 1970), 209.

18 “Leur Love universel, une tolerance totale des tendances minoritaires et des singularités” Ibid., 210.

19 Ibid., 209.

20 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 638.

21 Roland Barthes, “A Case of Cultural Criticism,” in The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, ed. Michael Carter (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 113.

22 This and the following quotes from Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), 217–218.

23 White, Introduction to Ode to Charles Fourier by André Breton

24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 293 and 292.

25 Fourier, Theory of The Four Movements, 283.

26 Ibid., 284.

27 Ibid., 284.

Text by
Lars Bang Larsen
e-flux Journal#26,6 /11

Introducing Objectivism by Ayn Rand

2011-08-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

The following is a short description of Objectivism given by Ayn Rand in 1962:

At a sales conference at Random House, preceding the publication of Atlas Shrugged, one of the book salesmen asked me whether I could present the essence of my philosophy while standing on one foot. I did as follows:

Metaphysics: Objective Reality
Epistemology: Reason
Ethics: Self-interest
Politics: Capitalism

If you want this translated into simple language, it would read: 1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.” 2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” 3. “Man is an end in himself.” 4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”

If you held these concepts with total consistency, as the base of your convictions, you would have a full philosophical system to guide the course of your life. But to hold them with total consistency—to understand, to define, to prove and to apply them—requires volumes of thought. Which is why philosophy cannot be discussed while standing on one foot—nor while standing on two feet on both sides of every fence. This last is the predominant philosophical position today, particularly in the field of politics.

My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Copyright © 1962 by Times-Mirror Co.

Ayn Rand and Thunderbird, 1964

Sommersneige

2011-08-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

Der grüne Sommer ist so leise
Geworden, dein kristallenes Antlitz.
Am Abendweiher starben die Blumen,
Ein erschrockener Amselruf.

Vergebliche Hoffnung des Lebens. Schon rüstet
Zur Reise sich die Schwalbe im Haus
Und die Sonne versinkt am Hügel;
Schon winkt zur Sternenreise die Nacht.

Stille der Dörfer; es tönen rings
Die verlassenen Wälder. Herz,
Neige dich nun liebender
Über die ruhige Schläferin.

Der grüne Sommer ist so leise
Geworden und es läutet der Schritt
Des Fremdlings durch die silberne Nacht.
Gedächte ein blaues Wild seines Pfads,

Des Wohllauts seiner geistlichen Jahre!

Georg Trakl

Decline of Summer

The green summer has grown
So gentle, your crystalline countenance.
By the evening pond the flowers died,
A frightened call of a blackbird.

Futile hope of life. Already the swallow
In the house prepares for the journey
And the sun sinks at the hill;
The night already beckons the starry journey.

Stillness of villages; the abandoned forests
Resound all around. Heart,
Now bend more tenderly
Over the tranquil sleeping woman.

The green summer has grown
So gentle; and the stranger's footstep
Rings through the silver night.
May a blue deer remember his path,

The harmony of his spiritual years!

Georg Trakl

Bird on Stamp

2011-08-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

Ain Draham is a city in northwestern Tunisia.
Its name describes the sulfurous hot springs in the area used by the Romans in antiquity.

Our sweet companions-sharing your bunk and your bed

2011-08-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

Our sweet companions—sharing your bunk and your bed
The versts and the versts and the versts and a hunk of your bread
The wheels' endless round
The rivers, streaming to ground
The road. . .

Oh the heavenly the Gypsy the early dawn light
Remember the breeze in the morning, the steppe silver-bright
Wisps of blue smoke from the rise
And the song of the wise
Gypsy czar. . .

In the dark midnight, under the ancient trees' shroud
We gave you sons as perfect as night, sons
As poor as the night
And the nightingale chirred
Your might. . .

We never stopped you, companions for marvelous hours
Poverty's passions, the impoverished meals we shared
The fierce bonfire's glow
And there, on the carpet below,
Fell stars. . .

Marina Tsvetaeva
Translated By Sasha Dugdale