The internet is pertinent and online spaces allow for work to exist indefinitely - Longer than a pdf could remain in circulation or even usable. Piss on the weatherman is realised as a simple html website, transcending the original structure of a PDF. It exists in a space of indefinite accessibility for uses to engage and interact with.
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‘PISS ON THE WEATHERMAN’ (2015)
Lily Chan, Aston Creus and Mashara Wachjudy
http://pissontheweatherman.com/
(Online artwork)
“Tantalus is an exponential tragedy. Stuck in a meta-space of limited capital and limitless growth, the fruit above him remains ever elusive, the water beneath him ever receding. Here, a weatherman fails to predict the weather. Sorites wonders when a heap of sand will stop being a heap of sand. Everywhere else, someone is watering a plastic plant.
If an initial condition is the state of an unknown system at any given point, this is X, the very beginning, the scrubbing away (the dusting, the polishing, the wiping) in an uphill battle to encroaching chaos and creation. Within these complex systems, the economist attempts to seek order: to accurately predict future states subject to their displacement in time. Does it stand to reason, then, that our judgement of initial conditions could see us arrive at an entirely different future to which we were otherwise bound?”
Franco Berardi's After the Future explains the changing terrain of the future. The future has become precarious. Twentieth century politics had a grasp on the future; it would be the realization ...
“Franco Berardi’s After the Future explains the changing terrain of the future. The future has become precarious. Twentieth century politics had a grasp on the future; it would be the realization of speed, progress and human strength. This notion of the future is rooted in modern capitalism, the indefinite expansion of capitalism into every corner of the world and of life. Berardi posits that all modern political ideologies share a “true faith” in the future and progress. When Berardi speaks of the future, he is not speaking of the temporal direction of time, but rather the shared imaginary of progress and utopia. To outline this conception of the future concretely, Berardi falls back on the Manifesto of Futurism from Filippo Marinetti. Marinetti’s manifesto paints a picture of the future as masculine utopia of strength and speed.
Berardi recognizes 1977 as the end of the future. He cites the punk movement’s declaration of “No Future.” Berardi says, “The future is not a natural dimension of the mind. It is a modality of projection and imagination, a feature of expectation and attention, and its modalities and features change with the changing of cultures. Futurism is the artistic movement that embodies and asserts the accomplished modernity of the future.” 1977 signaled the shift from future as utopia to future as dystopia. This inversion of the future threatens the collective imagination. Where the future was once a promise for progress, there is now only the precariousness of life. The possibility of devastation and catastrophe has caused a general paralysis of the will. This paralysis of will is founded in the triumph of general depression across the population.
The precariousness of daily life bleeds into the sphere of labor and production. Berardi seizes this opportunity to elaborate on a term he puts forth in other works, the precariat. The precariat is the aggregate of precarious proletariat. It is the work force held captive to labor that no longer has the defined rules of labor relations, salary or the length of the workday. Further, Berardi conceives of infolabor as the primary type of work of the precariat. Infolabor is the further abstraction of labor from concrete activity. Capitalism, or what Berardi designates as semiocapital, no longer operates on wage labor. Semiocapital buys packets of time to recombine in varieties of way. Berardi goes on to say, “cells of productive time can be mobilized in punctual, casual, and fragmentary forms. The recombination of these segments is automatically realized in the network. The mobile phone is the tool that makes possible the connection between the needs of semiocapital and the mobilization of the living labor of cyberspace. The ringtone of the mobile phone calls the workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flux.” Semiocapital has perfected the method of extracting labor from workers, the eight-hour workday has disappeared and no one has noticed.”
Video still from ‘Keeping order’, 2015. [Final piece]
Found footage, looping digital video, internet.
Approx. 8 min.
A series of digital video loops sped up and slowed down, depicting various banal tasks and cleaning laws. Looping endlessly and void of any graspable sense of time or resolution in sight, the piece is an ode to the everyday human - steadfast yet never victors in their fight against the encroaching chaos of entropy and gathering dust. I guess I wanted to portray the concept of erasure as pointless and nonsensical, both as a notion and in its physical visual sense. Rather it is a method of creation thinly veiled; a relocation of matter and data to somewhere too inconvenient for us to worry about.
Graham Turner and Cathy Alexander: Four decades after the book was published, Limit to Growth’s forecasts have been vindicated by new Australian research. Expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon
“The 1972 book Limits to Growth, which predicted our civilisation would probably collapse some time this century, has been criticised as doomsday fantasy since it was published. Back in 2002, self-styled environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg consigned it to the “dustbin of history”.
It doesn’t belong there. Research from the University of Melbourne has found the book’s forecasts are accurate, 40 years on. If we continue to track in line with the book’s scenario, expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.Limits to Growth was commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome. Researchers working out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including husband-and-wife team Donella and Dennis Meadows, built a computer model to track the world’s economy and environment. Called World3, this computer model was cutting edge.
The task was very ambitious. The team tracked industrialisation, population, food, use of resources, and pollution. They modelled data up to 1970, then developed a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on whether humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues. If that didn’t happen, the model predicted “overshoot and collapse” – in the economy, environment and population – before 2070. This was called the “business-as-usual” scenario.The book’s central point, much criticised since, is that “the earth is finite” and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc would eventually lead to a crash.”
ON February 22, protestors in New York City staged an intervention at the Guggenheim Museum in opposition to the planned construction of a Guggenheim franchise museum in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates). The protestors (who are organized under the name of G.U.L.F. Labor, Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction), were voicing their concerns over the exploitation of South Asian laborers in the U.A.E. who are hired to construct the museum. This protest follows earlier events involving the projection of “1% Global Museum’ across the exterior of New York Guggenheim, and is aligned with many artists worldwide (many from the Middle East) who have already publicly stated that they would not allow their works to be exhibited within this Museum if labor practices are not significantly improved. This illustrates a growing concern about the ways in which global arts institutions (which often signal the cultural status of a nation or city to an international audience and result in large economic gains for investors) impact the communities that are impacted directly by them, often negatively. The protestors themselves used artistic strategies to gain visibility to their cause, using the museum itself as the stage for public/media spectacle and political action. This draws from a legacy of aesthetic protests that date back to the 1960s, including the Art Workers Coalition protests regarding the under representation of women and minorities in U.S. museums, the student activism advocated by Abbie Hoffman, the institutional critiques of Hans Haacke, or, more recently, the video projections of Krzysztof Wodiczko. See links for more info. (including GULF Labor’s mock web site calling for more sustainable Guggenheim design plans).
Find out why Gulf Labor occupied the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in protest of the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank.
The Gulf Labor Coalition may be an official participant in this year’s Venice Biennale, but that doesn’t mean that the art and activism coalition has abandoned its preferred form of guerrilla protest actions, occupying the Israeli pavilion this week in an effort to draw attention to poor working conditions faced by Palestinians in the West Bank.
The group’s actions began the morning of August 2, with an intervention on the official Gulf banner that hangs in the Arsenale. Members of G.U.L.F. (Global Ultra Luxury Faction) added a “Handala” stencil to the banner, a symbol of the Palestinian Resistance created by Palestinian cartoonist Naji Salim al-Ali, who was assassinated in 1987, before holding an hour-long protest at the Israeli pavilion.
According to a statement on the Gulf Labor website, they are using the symbol, which depicts a “ten year old boy who turned his back to a world that will not bring the occupation of his homeland to justice,” to highlight both the everyday difficulties Palestinians face in a land occupied by Israelis and the indifference of Western institutions building in Abu Dhabi to the plight of workers there.
During a recent visit to the West Bank, “we were struck by the overlap between the circumstances of Palestinian workers and the predicament of South Asian migrants in the Gulf,” G.U.L.F. explained in a statement read prior to the Israeli pavilion occupation. “Under the occupation, the Palestinian people have become migrant workers in their own land.”
Gulf Labor called for the art world to join the growing Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
This is the second time this summer that activists have occupied the Israeli pavilion. In June, members of On Vacation, a Ukrainian art collective founded by the occupied Izolyatsia Center for Cultural Initiatives, invited visitors to don faux military gear and visit the pavilions of countries who are occupying powers. Israel, along with Russia and the US, were popular choices.
The 2015 edition of the politically-charged international art exhibition has been a hot spot for protesters in general, between the controversial mosque at the Icelandic pavilion (the city is currently being sued for shutting it down), the German pavilion’s stand against Greek austerity measures, and Gulf’s own action at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
In addition to drawing attention to the Palestinian cause, Gulf Labor has continued to put pressure on arts organizations building on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi to reform labor practices. Late last week, the coalitionreleased a report condemning the low wages and harsh working conditions still rampant on the island.
Their research on the issue appeared in the new book The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor, edited by Andrew Ross, a Gulf Labor member and NYU professor.
Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill
1982
Two hundred truckloads of dirt were placed on top of a 2 acre landfill site, furrows were dug by hand and cleared of rubbish/rocks. Seeds were then sown by hand and furrows covered in soil. The wheat field was maintained for four months - cleared of wheat smut, weeded, fertilised, sprayed against fungus. They then harvested the crops which yielded almost 1,000 pounds of healthy wheat.
Really interesting piece, what I would see also as maintenance art, calling attention to human social values, ecological worries. The land was worth $1.4 billion as it is such an urban space - planting wheat pointed to the inequality in the way human produce is distributed and managed. Denes sent some of the harvest around the world in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors.”
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, The Keeping of the Keys, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, 1973. Helen Molesworth writes, “In The Keeping of the Keys, Ukeles took the museum guards’ keys and systematically locked and unlocked museum doors throughout the day, wreaking havoc on the logic of the museum’s workday. The piece so infuriated the curators, who felt that their office should be exempt, that when Ukeles announced that the office was to become a piece of maintenance art, all but one curator ran out of the room, fleeing both the artist and their own work.”
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