Presidential hopeful John McCain is hiding a skeleton in his closet. Not your typical political scandal, Senator McCain’s dirty little secret is his longtime involvement with the International Republican Institute (IRI), an organization that operates in 60 countries and is budgeted by millions of US taxpayer dollars each year.

As with most of Žižek work - I agree with some of some parts and disagree with the other parts. For instance the frame he uses to displace the "left" from the Zapatistas to the Democrats - is that they are bound by a tactical frivolity that is more about humor than one of direct class warfare - well one could say that of all of Žižek work (it is funny, critical, full of love for globalization's pop-culture and he also lacks any push to direct action at the scale of class war that Chávez has done). He also falls into the greater paradigm of immaterial globalization that resists looking at the the situated conditions within each states and to what degree they function as they either function as mediators for neoliberal(isms) or as resistance(s) sites - one can sense the nature of the situated frame of this struggle with the the battle for how Mexican oil and how it will continue to function - as state-owned or as privately owned or how the Zapatistas still view the state as an important component for resistance to globalization/while accepting the process of new networks that flow beyond the state to question the state from within/without - without erasing Mexico as a state - so the long of and short of it is that Žižek is a "subcomediante" himself - which is fine with me, since words and ideas are just as important to me - but, if I ever see him take the reins of the State power like Chávez - it will the funniest revolution ever too happen! and I will certainly be happy to join in!

ciao,
r

summer exhibition at Brooke Alexander Gallery
http://www.baeditions.com/Installation%20Views/Colab%20Redux/Colab%20Red...

Colab (officially Collaborative Projects, Inc., founded 1977) was one in a string of New York City artists’ groups that started most strongly in the 1960s. Artists’ groups have had an escalating impact on the conventional art world. Today a number have roughly equal status with prominent individuals.

[Note of disclosure: I was a member of Colab, and have published on the group’s activities.]

Rauschenberg

A personal appreciation on the occasion of Robert Rauschenberg's death

I was born in 1951, a clean slate, the same year Robert Rauschenberg accomplished his famous series of white interactive paintings. It seems to me he has been inter-filling my mind in ever since; though we never met.

I was trying to remember how I first became aware of his work: but of course it was through the mechanically reproduced. As a freshman at
Hinsdale High School I purchased a copy of Calvin Tomkins’s book "Ahead of the Game" (I still own it! – the cover incorporates "L.H.O.O.Q." by Marcel
Duchamp), in which Rauschenberg was introduced to me via Duchamp, John Cage and Jean Tinguely. I think I had been prepared to become devoted to his combination-permutation sensibility because I had been highly excited, as a 10 year old boy, by the Dada collages I had discovered in the Max Ernst exhibition I saw the summer of 1961 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Gustave Courbet (portrait by Nadar; public domain)

Is Spiral Jetty threatened by petro-greed? Two environmental organizations, Friends of the Great Salt Lake and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, recently alerted Nancy Holt, the widow of Robert Smithson, of a wildcat oil company seeking state permission to do exploratory drilling of the West Rozel Field, an underwater oil deposit in the Great Salt Lake just a couple of miles from Spiral Jetty. Holt appealed to her friends in the arts and media, urging them "to save the beautiful, natural Utah environment around the Spiral Jetty from oil drilling." Over a thousand emails of protest were sent to the Utah Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, which in response has extended the period of public comment to February 13, 2008 on Application to Permit Drilling #08-8853.

Review of DEEP TRANCE BEHAVIOR IN POTATOLAND
(A RICHARD FOREMAN THEATER MACHINE)
by Joseph Nechvatal
DEEP TRANCE BEHAVIOR IN POTATOLAND Photo @ Paula Court