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Is the U.S. Still a ‘Land of Opportunity’?

Room for Debate

“We wanted to make an ‘I Love New York’ picture and ended up with this.” _Maurizio Cattelan

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'Somewhere To Disappear'

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From Olga's Diary

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Required Reading: 'L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints'

“Until 30 years ago, it was routine practice to keep contemporary art and ‘ethnic’ art in separate categories,” New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote in a recent review of Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s history of the contemporary art scene in 1960s L.A., Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s. Mr. Cotter continued, “Those days are over, or should be, but they linger on in this book, which ignores entire cultures while meticulously cataloging the marital mishaps and bad-boy pranks of a few Establishment ‘rebels.’”

Aiming to provide a counterbalance, Mr. Cotter pointed to L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints, a magisterial new volume on African-American artists in Los Angeles that has just been published by the Tilton Gallery.

The book is a beauty. It is also, for a writer whose knowledge of the L.A. scene has long revolved around a superficial knowledge of the activities of the era’s storied Ferus Gallery (which held shows with emerging stars like Ed Keinholz, Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha), a deeply unsettling read.

~ Andrew Russeth, New York Observer

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Township Billboards

Perhaps the title should read Township and Billboard. Billboards have been the medium of communication between the rulers and the denizens of townships since the beginning of the township. The billboard is a fact and feature of   township landscape.  It is a relic from the times when Africans were subjects of power and the township was a restricted area; subject to laws, municipality by-laws and ordinances regulating people's movements and governing who may or may not enter the township. It is without irony when I say that billboards can be used as reference points when plotting the history and development of the township. Billboards capture and encapsulate ideology, the social, economic and political climate at any given time. They retain their appeal for social engineering.

Apartheid billboards were very austere, and were chiefly concerned with the 'sanitation syndrome'. The economic boom of the sixties introduced American style highway advertising billboards thus rendering Apartheid ideology anonymous and opaque. In the politically turbulent period of the '70s and '80 the overtly political billboards made their return. This time the struggle was for the hearts and minds of the populace. Recently, with the liberalization of politics the billboard is chiefly used to address the rising consumer culture and the anxiety caused by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This last is a campaign partly financed by government.

I read somewhere that ads create a sense of participating in the utopia of beauty: Life as it should be. A drive from the city into Soweto will quickly dispel this notion as misguided. Billboards line the freeway on both sides. In the name of freedom of speech one's cultural sensibility is assaulted by textual and visual messages. The trip can hardly be described as boring. Nobody ever complains of the visual pollution. At the high speed of a minibus taxi, the billboards roll by like flipping pages in a book. The retina registers arcane and inane messages about sex and cell-phones, mostly sex and cell-phones. Perhaps this is a coincidence. I wonder.

 ~ Santu Mofokeng
 

“Before My Eyes”

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Power to the Imagination. Artists, Posters and Politics

The exhibition presents in excess of 180 works by approximately 90 internationally renowned artists and thus offers a fresh and comprehensive overview over protest and opposition movements in the course of the past 60 years.At the same time it highlights the tensions between utopia, the wish for participation and political history – looking at the newly reviewed protests this subject is highly topical. Artists’ posters tell the story of protest, commitment to freedom and human rights, the fight for equal rights and tolerance.

“Power to Fantasy” was the artist Pierre Soulages’ slogan of support to the students protesting in Paris in May 1968. The Post-War period when Picasso emphazised his support for peace with his doves of peace, was followed by the rebellions of the 60s.A decade later the freedom of minorities was at the centre of attention, and shortly after artists such as Joseph Beuys focussed on the pollution of the environment. By the mid-80s AIDS drew attention to discrimination and exclusion of minorities and equality was pursued by American artists especially, examples are Keith Haring or Jenny Holzer.

Globalisation after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 left its mark on posters by Robert Rauschenberg and others. The history of international protest, illustrated by powerful designs by the great artists of our times is equally the history of art of this time – narrated selectively, yet expressing an astonishing continuity and authenticity.

via: Kunstmeile Hamburg