Images

Art & Experience

Last week The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones released a list entitled: 50 Works of Art to See Before You Die. These kind of lists are fascinating. There is a superficial desire to go through lists like these and tick of the things you have done. To see if you fit in – if you are on track. But there is also a nice thing about easy lists – they create a kind of canon which we can relate to.

Naturally there it did not take long for a collection of images to appear online – so now you don’t even have to look around you can easily browse the list.

But should lists like this be easy? I would prefer to change the focus of the list and call it 50 Works of Art to Understand Before you Die. Simply “seeing” art is not enough. Or is it? A long time ago I was at the Louvre (only a brief visit) and I was shocked at the amount of people thronging around the one piece of art which they probably had seen most in their lives (though not in real-life, whatever than means).

Most visitors stood in front of the Mona Lisa while they seemed to ignore most other works. What were they really looking at? A work of art or a great PR campaign?

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Obey & Mashup

The first time I saw the Obey image was on a t-shirt. Then I saw it on a wall in Barcelona. Since then it appeared and re-appeared on walls around the world. It was naturally there before I saw it, but since then it I have seen it on other walls and t-shirts. Not really sure what it means but it is intriguing.

One of the spookier versions of this images is a mashup from Iran. Not that I have ever been in Iran but I found it over at the Wooster Collective.

Pretty spooky…

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Grey Saturday

Yupp another rainy Saturday has rolled around. While taking a walk around town I managed to pick up Vilém Flusser‘s book Towards a Philosophy of Photography which seems very exiting. Also discovered that the cool exhibition by Mattias Adolfsson (blogged about him earlier and he also has a blog with images) was still available and so was my favourite picture. So I bought the Beatnik Dragon.

Not a bad bit of procrastination – but now it’s back to the the real writing. Or rather as LP would say – the stuff that I really get paid for…

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Toaster Filling

As mentioned earlier we are going to build a Freedom Toaster for the Technical Museum in Stockholm. Naturally itâ??s on a short deadline â?? life would be boring otherwise!

As part of the Toaster we also want to include more stuff than simply an operating system. We want to have texts, images, music and film. We also want the material to be Creative Commons licensed (or similar) so that people can do more than simply be passive consumers (if they choose to be more).

In an instance of synchronicity Рtoday I aimlessly browsed into the blog of an excellent artist & cartoonist and was blown away (who says procrastination is all bad?). Not only this but he happens to live in G̦teborg (same city as me).

Naturally I emailed him about the project and he is interested in helping to provide some of his artwork for the project. What can I say? Sometimes Fortuna plays along. Check out the artwork on Mattias Adolssonâ??s blog.

This is his Beatnick Dragon
Posted on by mklang

Walls of Ceuta & Melilla

Continuing (earlier here and here) on the topic of walls of segregation. Here is more on Ceuta and Melilla.
Unfortunately only available in French and Italian the Migreurop have published The Black Book of Ceuta and Melilla online. The work documents the atrocities being committed under the guise of controlling illegal immigration to the EU via the Spanish north-African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. The introduction to the publication is available in English here.

Statewatch writes that the book contains… “…analysis, photographs and extensive testimonies from migrants themselves, who are thus given the opportunity to describe their experiences of what EU institutions euphemistically refer to as an ‘integrated system to fight illegal immigration’, which is repeatedly, and annoyingly, considering that migrants have been shot, abandoned to die in the desert, hunted down and detained in inhumane conditions, followed by the phrase while respecting human rights.”

Read also Peio Aierbe’s The “assault” by “sub-Saharan migrants” in the media.
(via Subtopia)

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Homage to Catalonia

One of the things that I promised myself was that I would read more fiction after I was done with the PhD. Right now I am reading Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia” which is a mix of memory and description of the Spanish civil war were Orwell went to fight against facism. For Orwell the journey to Spain was necessary since it was the first country to actually protest the facist regime and to put up a fight against what was to prove to be the last centuries biggest political mistake.

He also writes with brutal honesty about the terrible conditions of those involved in the everyday fighting of the war. There is no glamour and even less honour.

An example which takes place after an attack on a facist position outside the town of Heusca. They took the facist trench but were driven back again:

They had left the parapet and were coming after us. ‘Run!’ I yelled to Moyle, and jumped to my feet. And heavens, how I ran! I had thought earlier in the night that you can’t run when you are sodden from head to foot and weighted down with a rifle and cartridges; I learned now you can always run when you think you have fifty or a hundred armed men after you. But if I could run fast, others could run faster.

On the totality of his experiences in Spain, Orwell writes:

When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line, and at the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most futile of my whole life. I had joined the militia in order to fight against Fascism, and as yet I had scarcely fought at all, had merely existed as a sort of passive object, doing nothing in return for my rations except to suffer from cold and lack of sleep. Perhaps that is the fate of most soldiers in most wars. But now that I can see this period in perspective I do not altogether regret it.

This is the most iconic photo of this conflict. It is Robert Capa’s Death of a Republican

Posted on by mklang