Facebook Image: Noah Fisher, May 8, 2015, Venice. Ivor Stodolsky, Gregory Sholette, Amin Husain, Natasha and Joulia Strauss.

May 8, 2015, VENICE — At 10:20am this morning, two boatloads of artists and activists occupied the dock landing of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (PGC) in Venice.

Facebook Image: Noah Fisher, May 8, 2015, Venice.

The message:

‘This morning we shut down the Venice Guggenheim by way of boats, for the same reason we recently shut it down in NYC: to crank up pressure on the museum to meet the worker’s demands in Abu Dhabi for dignified rather than debt-bonded labor conditions. Now is the time: main construction starts in the next few months .

Even since I was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale with Gulf Labor, it was always clear that this was a new possible stage for the campaign, and also that we should avoid export/import politics so frequently seen in high-flying art exhibitions. Following months of setting up relationships and plans through skype, this time we were joined by more than 30 people from occupied art spaces in Venice & Milan: Seasoned activists who provided us with all kinds of support and quickly became friends.

After a day of meetings and a night of banner painting, we rode through the grand canal on five boats and scrambled up on the Guggenheim to occupy its canal-facing facade with a banner carefully lettered by Joulia, waving colorful flags and bearing signs, then a group shut down the entrance on the other side. After a few hours the museum agreed to meet a small delegation of us, and after a couple more hours Richard Armstrong called from NYC, they had acceded to our demand to meet with the board of directors. The campaign is far from over but it was a big win today in Venice!

– from Facebook wall, Noah Fisher 

Facebook Image: Noah Fisher.

The flyer. Image for Hyperallergic.

Facebook Image: Amin Husain

Facebook Image: Noah Fisher, May 8, 2015, Venice.

Facebook Image: Joulia Strauss.

Facebook Image: Joulia Strauss.

Facebook Image: Amin Husain

– Images and text coordinated by J.G. Wita

The post 56th Venice Biennale Art Activism appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Guerrilla Girls members

Artist-activists target art world’s hypocrisy and corruption while rubbing elbows at events

by By Jennifer Smith for WSJ

Last weekend, the art-activist group the Guerrilla Girls engaged in a typically bumptious gesture: projecting images from their latest campaign on the side of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s building in lower Manhattan as a block party to fete the new location wound to a close.

“Dear Art Collector,” read the message, traced in bright light from a mobile projector run by another New York City activist group, The Illuminator Art Collective.

“art is sooo expensive!

even for billionaires

we totally get why

you can’t pay all your employees a living wage”

It has been three decades since the Guerrilla Girls first began plastering New York’s art districts with funny, statistic-filled posters decrying the dearth of female artists on museum and gallery walls. Now the group—along with a new generation of artist-activists—continues to skewer what they see as the art world’s hypocrisy and corruption.

Never mind that the Whitney, which declined to comment on the “Dear Art Collector” projection, now owns more than 90 works by Guerrilla Girls. Or that some of the group’s members—clad in their trademark gorilla suits, to preserve anonymity—mingled with curators at a recent artist reception at the new building. An exhibit of their posters, stickers and billboards opened this month at Abrons Arts Center downtown, and the Guerrilla Girls have embarked on a new campaign.

Targets include everything from the art establishment’s lack of diversity—an issue that by some measures has made only marginal progress since 1985—to labor issues and soaring prices paid by wealthy collectors in today’s turbocharged art market.

“We are the agitated outsiders, the creative complainers, and we like it that way,” a Guerrilla Girl who identified herself as Käthe Kollwitz said in a recent interview. (Members assume the names of dead female artists.)

Recently, the group has teamed up with newer groups of activist artists. They include the Illuminator, as well as Occupy Museums and the Gulf Labor artist coalition, which on Friday shut down the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum with a protest over labor practices at Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, where the museum is planning to build a new branch.

Another Guerrilla Girl, Frida Kahlo, said she was heartened to see a new crop of artists engaging in political art, many of them in collectives that operate outside the traditional art market.

“They are veering away from the idea of the lone individualistic genius,” Ms. Kahlo said. “They don’t want to participate in the art system.”

Take Noah Fischer, a Brooklyn artist and activist involved in the action at the Guggenheim organized by Gulf Labor, a group that has staged multiple protests over what it sees as exploitative conditions for the largely migrant workforce on Saadiyat Island.

Trained as a sculptor, Mr. Fischer, 38 years old, said he quit showing his work in traditional galleries amid the financial downturn, having concluded that the same economic system that led to the crisis was also fueling the art market: “I thought, I want to be challenging that system, not trying my hardest to be supported by those people.”

In 2011 he joined the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zuccotti Park and wrote a manifesto that catalyzed the Occupy Museums movement. Occupy Museums mounted a protest in September at the Metropolitan Museum of Art over the new plaza endowed by billionaire David H. Koch and recently helped stage an action outside the Whitney over an adjacent natural-gas pipeline.

Read more >

The post Activists New and Old Jab Art World appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

“We organized the AbStrike [abstract strike] event in Venice and Milan and we’ve been involved with Gulf Labor for over a year,” Emanuele Braga of Macao told Hyperallergic. “AbStrike is exploring the possibilities for strikes for cultural workers. We gathered various projects that explore the issue of artist workers and debt, among other issues. We did joint events in Venice and Milan, which is hosting Expo [that is having labor issues], to also see how these models that are both pushing forward this model of labor precarity and build up a different type of consciousness in the workers and raise awareness in the communities and the media.”

The event is the first “official” event of Gulf Labor’s Biennale participation, according to New York University professor Andrew Ross, who made headlines in March when he was banned from visiting the United Arab Emirates.

Originally Published by Hyperallergic Media, Inc.

Read More – Hyperallergic Media >

The post Gulf Labor and Other Arts Groups Occupy Venice’s Guggenheim appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Mimicking the Russian military involvement in east Ukraine, a group of Ukrainian artists and activists have staged a mock-occupation of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, descending on the venue in camouflage fatigues.

The artists then urged visiting tourists to take selfies wearing military uniforms they handed out.

The uniforms had the words “On Vacation” printed on them, a reference to the now-infamous remarks during Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine, when the separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko said the Russian soldiers were enjoying a “vacation … among brothers who are fighting for their freedom”.

On their website, the activists are asking visitors to the Venice Bienniale art show to find an #onvacation representative, as they call themselves, put on a uniform and then take a selfie in “an occupying power of your choice” and post it to Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #onvacation.

“#onvacation challenges the viewer to actualise their opinions and beliefs about their understanding and experience of occupation,” said a statement on the website.

It added: “The project offers an entirely genuine engagement in a well-known structure – the free vacation sweepstakes, but it also positions this engagement in a conflict that is constantly denied by the occupying power.”

Originally Published by Guradian News.

Read more – Guardian News >

The post Ukrainian artists occupy Russian pavilion at Venice Biennale appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

“Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure,” Issue One

Architecture remains the most tangible way of constructing the social. Yet, the system we call “architecture” is not reducible to the physical, the tactile, the obvious. In the history of avant-garde architecture, immateriality and intangibility carried a promise of liberation, of escape from the heaviness of building, from completion, from gravity or reality. A new contemporary architecture would be built out of pure knowledge—drafted on paper as an idea to be shared, never bogged down by the technicalities of constructing in dimensional space, or even any spatial paradigm altogether. The history of the avant-garde can’t—as Beatriz Colomina has pointed out—be separated from its engagement with media and communication. Building would move at the speed of thought and spirit, superseding calculation, regulation, codes, and existing infrastructure.

Architects today do not conceptualize their work in such radical terms. Is it because they are too busy stalking clients in China and the Gulf? Maybe. But at the same time, architects today also have to contend with the fact that other immaterial, intangible forces have subordinated much of the spatial thinking that historically situated architecture in relation to the building and planning of spaces and cities. As Keller Easterling has written in a previous essay, “it is as if architecture, as customarily defined, cannot access some of the most important levers of explicit, measurable spatial change, leaving control of them largely to the financial industries.”

But what are these levers? Or for that matter, how has architecture always given form to the immaterial or intangible spatial effects in communication pathways, or war, rubble, memory, tourism, and cultural capital? Hasn’t architecture always provided a way of reading ethical transgressions in reverse, of giving them form, for better or for worse? How has physical architecture always been a symptom of ideology? How has it always been a communications infrastructure?

How, then, can we contextualize more recent advances in registering and distributing space, in order to place them back into the history of architecture? Just look at how something like Airbnb abstracts and dissolves, even fiscalizes, core notions such as what constitutes a home. And it presents this as data before an economy of sharing and selling that takes place above and beyond architectural intervention. In the cities where Airbnb is being used most heavily, it is planning urban space, but without urban planners. Except maybe someone like Molly Turner, Airbnb’s new director of public policy, who is an urban planner, and describes Airbnb as part of a “third wave of tech … taking all of the connectivity and transactions that are occurring online and bringing them back offline into the real world.”

Airbnb can be part of a new integrated meta-architecture that involves the pooling and marketing of space in a way where, in a broad sense, architectural interventions on the level of building tend to serve as decorative afterthoughts to the capture and recording of not only space, but also of practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills. This is the aim of UNESCO’s initiative over the past decade to update the concept of cultural heritage to include immaterial and intangible cultural products. UNESCO’s Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) becomes a device for making another layer of global culture visible and searchable across long distances, and an amplifying mechanism for heritage that can allow it to be converted from culture into a knowledge database, and back into culture again. Is this something we can compare to what Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury imagined as a building that would record memories of a place as data, but also demolish its physical matter with each kilobyte or megabyte it records?

Edited together with Nikolaus Hirsch, this first part of a special double issue of e-flux journal focusing on architecture invites a number of the field’s most audacious and adventurous thinkers to consider how these invisible and intangible forces are rebuilding cities and reformatting space over and above the role that architecture once served. They are not only reducible to data streams and technocratic information pathways, but also convert ethical questions of whose hands do the actual work of building into material expressions of labor markets, economic flows, and colonial memory. They include the passage from the formal domain of building to an informal domain of knowledge in research-based university departments as well as in slums, black markets, shadow networks, and courtrooms alike. How are practicing architects already working to adapt the radical propositions of architecture to build and think in a way that takes this often contradictory information into consideration?

The second issue of “Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure” will be released in September 2015 with essays and contributions from Beatriz Colomina, Bernard Khoury, Hu Fang, Ingo Niermann and Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Hans Hollein, and others.

© 2015 e-flux and the author

The post e-flux: “Architecture as Intangible Infrastructure,” appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

On Art Activism

Current discussions about art are very much centered on the question of art activism—that is, on the ability of art to function as an arena and medium for political protest and social activism. The phenomenon of art activism is central to our time because it is a new phenomenon—quite different from the phenomenon of critical art that became familiar to us during recent decades. Art activists do not want to merely criticize the art system or the general political and social conditions under which this system functions. Rather, they want to change these conditions by means of art—not so much inside the art system but outside it, in reality itself. Art activists try to change living conditions in economically underdeveloped areas, raise ecological concerns, offer access to culture and education for the populations of poor countries and regions, attract attention to the plight of illegal immigrants, improve the conditions of people working in art institutions, and so forth. In other words, art activists react to the increasing collapse of the modern social state and try to replace the social state and the NGOs that for different reasons cannot or will not fulfill their role. Art activists do want to be useful, to change the world, to make the world a better place—but at the same time, they do not want to cease being artists. And this is the point where theoretical, political, and even purely practical problems arise.

_{Michael Rakowitz, Joe Heywood’s paraSITE shelter, 2000. Battery Park City, Manhattan. Plastic bags, polyethylene tubing, hooks, tape. Courtesy of the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery, NY}

Art activism’s attempts to combine art and social action come under attack from both of these opposite perspectives—traditionally artistic and traditionally activist ones. Traditional artistic criticism operates according to the notion of artistic quality. From this point of view, art activism seems to be artistically not good enough: many critics say that the morally good intentions of art activism substitute for artistic quality. This kind of criticism is, actually, easy to reject. In the twentieth century, all criteria of quality and taste were abolished by different artistic avant-gardes—so, today, it makes no sense to appeal to them again. However, criticism from the other side is much more serious and demands an elaborate critical answer. This criticism mainly operates according to notions of “aestheticization” and “spectacularity.” A certain intellectual tradition rooted in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord states that the aestheticization and spectacularization of politics, including political protest, are bad things because they divert attention away from the practical goals of political protest and towards its aesthetic form. And this means that art cannot be used as a medium of a genuine political protest—because the use of art for political action necessarily aestheticizes this action, turns this action into a spectacle and, thus, neutralizes the practical effect of this action. As an example, it is enough to remember the recent Berlin Biennale curated by Artur Żmijewski and the criticism it provoked—described as it was by different ideological sides as a zoo for art activists.

In other words, the art component of art activism is often seen as the main reason why this activism fails on the pragmatic, practical level—on the level of its immediate social and political impact. In our society, art is traditionally seen as useless. So it seems that this quasi-ontological uselessness infects art activism and dooms it to failure. At the same time, art is seen as ultimately celebrating and aestheticizing the status quo—and thus undermining our will to change it. So the way out of this situation is seen mostly in the abandoning of art altogether—as if social and political activism never fails as long as it is not infected by art viruses.

Martin Kippenberger, The Modern House of Believing or Not, 1985. Oil on canvas.

The critique of art as useless and therefore morally and politically bad is not a new one. In the past, this critique compelled many artists to abandon art altogether—and to start to practice something more useful, something morally and politically correct. However, contemporary art activism does not rush to abandon art but, rather, tries to make art itself useful. This is a historically new position. Its newness is often relativized by a reference to the phenomenon of the Russian avant-garde, which famously wanted to change the world by artistic means. It seems to me that this reference is incorrect. The Russian avant-garde artists of the 1920s believed in their ability to change the world because at the time their artistic practice was supported by Soviet authorities. They knew that power was on their side. And they hoped that this support would not decrease with time. Contemporary art activism has, on the contrary, no reason to believe in external political support. Art activism acts on its own—relying only on its own networks and on weak and uncertain financial support from progressively minded art institutions. This is, as I said, a new situation—and it calls for new theoretical reflection.

The central goal of this theoretical reflection is this: to analyze the precise meaning and political function of the word “aestheticization.” I believe that such an analysis allows us to clarify the discussions around art activism and the place where it stands and acts. I would argue that today, the word “aestheticization” is mostly used in a confused and confusing way. When one speaks about “aestheticization,” one often refers to different and even opposing theoretical and political operations. The reason for this state of confusion is the division of contemporary art practice itself into two different domains: art in the proper sense of the word, and design. In these two domains, aestheticization means two different things. Let us analyze this difference.

Read more >

The post e-flux Journal: On Art Activism appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.