review of Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen
with contributions by Peter Laugesen, Carl Nørrested, Fabian Tompsett, Gordon Fazakerley, Jacqueline de Jong, Hardy Strid, Karen Kurczynski, Stewart Home and the editors
Nebula (Copenhagen) and Autonomedia (Brooklyn), 2011

A sprawling exhibition now at Museo Reina Sofia (through October 3, 2011; then traveling), “Magnetized Space” looks at the work of the junior partner of the Brazilian Grupo Frente. Pape was a co-founder of that 1954 initiative with the better known Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark.

Towards an Immersive Intelligence

A review of Joseph Nechvatal's "Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality 1993-2006" Edgewise, New York, 2009, 93pp.

There was once this cave full of your most beautiful dreams

by Erik Empson

at

Immersion Into Noise
Joseph Nechvatal’s Immersive Noise Theory
by Yuting Zou
Published in The Brooklyn Rail April Issue 2011

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/04/books/nechvatals-immersive-noise-the...

Joseph Nechvatal
Immersion Into Noise

LEE WELLS: ACTION FOR FREEDOM
ROOSTER GALLERY, 190 ORCHARD STREET, NYC
FEBRUARY 17 – MARCH 12, 2011

Pirate Flag #2, 2010, HD Video, 10 minutes

Wikipedia: Blowback is the espionage term for the violent, unintended consequences of a covert operation that are suffered by the civil population of the aggressor government. To the civilians suffering the blowback of covert operations, the effect typically manifests itself as “random” acts of political violence without a discernible, direct cause; because the public—in whose name the intelligence agency acted—are ignorant of the effected secret attacks that provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them.

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February 22, 2011. What's in a name? "Action for Freedom", the generic, boosterish title of Lee Wells' new exhibition of paintings and recycled digital video, at first sounds like a grassroots community organization, a vigilante committee, even a policy wonk's think tank. But those two fully loaded buzzwords, which might suggest engagement or advocacy in another context, are defused here, rendered open-ended and non-specific. Like other bland amalgams which tend to litter the political landscape - could Wells have titled his exhibition "New Republic" or "National Review"? - the connotation is intentionally ambiguous.

David Wojnarowicz "A Fire in My Belly" Original from ppow_gallery on Vimeo.

December 16, 2010. The above is taken from the Vimeo page of PPOW Gallery and from the archives of NYU's Fales Library. It represents two segments, of approximately 13 and 7 minutes, that David Wojnarowicz shot and edited on Super 8 in 1986-87, which he entitled "A Fire In My Belly". It is NOT the four minute piece that was yanked from the National Portrait Gallery show on December 1. It is also NOT the video I posted earlier on this blog, with its Diamanda Galas banshee wail/dirge of "Unclean". Nor the segment I have seen with an overlaid soundtrack of a 1980s ACT UP demonstration. Wojnarowicz shot and presented his original footage without sound, a suggestion of the urgency and severity of the political climate that led to the mantra of "Silence = Death".

It is two weeks since the "silencing" of "A Fire In My Belly", and as we near Sunday's rally on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, it's clear that the culture wars are by no means over. This is hardly news to anyone following the hurtful antics of the Tea Party. Ever more empowered by their victories in the midterm election, the same purveyors of fear and purposeful obfuscation who demonized Obama for the past two years are trying to legislate and coerce the cultural landscape, to make art conform to their hypocritical and faux Christian yardstick. The fact that their cynical misunderstanding and bad intentions AGAIN fall directly on Wojnarowicz's shoulders is testimony to the enduring raw, elemental, and confrontational power of his art. Although the forces of reaction and censorship will always find something to belittle and attempt to repress, we almost have to thank them for forcing the issue and focusing attention on work that especially needs to be discussed and re-evaluated right now, as an antidote to right wing resurgence.

Recent events, and business prospects before me,
have engendered a second "review" of cultural documents that support royalism, particularly UK royalism.

First, whatever has been proposed for Disney dolls stands. That's right, Wolfgang, at least to the point of discrediting such dolls, I stand by the view that young girls, like my daughter, should not be growing up wanting to be a princess.

Here is a simultaneous review, or series of comments, on two films.