“Blog this!”

Well, Art Life is over. The class has finished.
Everyone and -thing seems so depressed! It is essential to maintain optimism even when you have learned from the most reliable sources that the situation is even worse than you thought. Don’t let the reality being constructed for you sap your will. Go on and make it different.
Friday, when the "NY Post" carried pictures of a haggard Saddam in his jail cell, even as the "Times" ran two inside pages of an Afghani cab driver tortured to death by Americans in the invasion there I thought of Paul Werner’s scary post on his WOID letter http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ptw1/WOID.html about “Greuelpropaganda,” what Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called "defensive war against atrocities propaganda." That’s what the government puts out when somebody’s called their bluff and raised embarrassing facts. This is a bad sign on the media horizon…
(Do you suppose that when the police came for them, those activists and political people in '30s Germany and '70s Latin America were experiencing depressive symptoms? What do you think they took for that?)
It is over, and yet Art Life continues. Putting this class together – or piling it up, maybe! – I have learned so much about what is happening in the world of creative resistance. Today was like the first session, no one showed up but Seth and Andrea, so we just had a chat. We tried to look at Nils Norman’s comic book for Thurrock in 2015 (the “graphic novel” at http://www.visionarythurrock.org.uk/docs/artists/nilsnorman/) but it wouldn’t launch. It’s charming, with the little South Park-style hippie greenies going around saving their blighted community. We looked at his vehicles, the Geocruiser (a converted bus), and the grandly named bicycle-mounted Gerard Winstanley Radical Gardening Space Reclamation Mobile Field Center and Weather Station. Then ambled over to the Danish design group N55 with their multiple “manuals.” These guys are an anarchist’s Ikea, with multiple splendidly articulated and suavely designed projects. Seth had also seen Temporary Services’ wonderful Mobile Structures Resources http://www.temporaryservices.org/mobile_struct_rsrce.html. And we didn’t even look at their Mobile Sign Systems page. Seeing all this makes one want to DO something! Uh-oh, art that makes you wanna make art is as bad as books that make you want to write.
* * *
Since it is unclear who is looking at this blog, I will post the readings I sent to our list for the final session, even though we did not discuss them. I will also probably continue this blog as I mull over the course experience – the final product will be a syllabus, which I’ll post to my website – which remains merely a gleam in my eye… (I may break down and download FrontPage – ugh!)
[my email to the class]
Dear Friends,
Here is the material I just added to the “Art Life” box at Mayday Books. Some of it you can just take, some of it you will have to take to the copy shop.

ONLINE – and only one copy in the box

A good article on recent protest art:
“Art Crimes: The Ebb, Flow & Dilemma of Protest Art,” by Kari Lydersen, 3.26.01
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featlydersen_74_p.htm

A piece on a central problem in this kind of work – recuperation:
“The Revolution Will Not Be Commodified: Prolefeed and the co-opting of protest culture,” by The Mobiustrip, 2/23/02
http://www.the44.net/blog/rev1/

IN PRINT ONLY – 5 copies in the box

old stuff, chart of genealogy of classic avant-gardes –
George Maciunas, “Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus” – oversized chart, 5 pieces, substantial overlap

“A Drink with a Twist” – Interview with Superflex about the Guarana project, Arthur [magazine], January 2005

Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen, “Lunch Hour: Art, Community, Administrated Space and Unproductive Activity,” from Ted Purves, ed., What We Want Is Free (SUNY 2005)

Selections from “Digital Detournement,” a catalogue published by Ed Marszowski in 2003 for the Version 03 conference in Chicago
A survey of recent projects from this conference. Some idea of the most recent one, Ver. 05 just concluded, is at http://versionfest.com/version05/festival/archives/000334.html

print, only ONE copy (it’s big):
an extensive series of cases or project histories --
Ted Purves (and his seminar), “Handbook for Gift and Exchange-Based Art” from Purves, ed., What We Want Is Free (SUNY 2005)
this is 70 pages, 35 leaves

OTHER STUFF NOT IN THE BOX, but relevant and online –
This is a text I read from last week, a review by the Italian labor theorist Bifo about a book by the net art theorist Lovink – “Franco Bifo Berardi reviews Geert Lovink’s ‘dark fiber’”
http://www.generation-online.org/t/Bifosreview.htm

This is a text I’ve been mulling. The panel includes the theorist Brian Holmes, and artist Claire Pentecost, active in the Critical Art Ensemble defense effort.
Nataša Petrešin -- “Potentiality of a Cultural Resistance: Talk with Brian Holmes, Claire Pentecost, Marko Peljhan, Igor Zabel” – a 16 Beaver group “Journalisms” posting at –
http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/001377.php