Discord-ian

Has just completed Foundation Degree Art Practice with DISTINCTION at Merthyr Tydfil campus of University of Glamorgan (Uni of South Wales) with a First in each module. B.A Hons year starts in September. I am an artist who works in a variety of media. By putting the viewer on the wrong track, my artworks reference environmentalism, politics of the everyday, philosophy, post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.

[butwhyamimetoo]

the bleakest night of my life

so much regret and all i held onto was hope

it's gone

i'm empty inside no tears left

[butwhyamimetoo]

20 prominent paedophiles - including ministers and former MPs

ARTIST TAXI DRIVER @chunkymark 

20 prominent paedophiles - including former MPs and government ministers - abused children for "decades" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z3ZG0Jdnl4 … #c4news

[butwhyamimetoo]

Aletheia

Musings from my blog: http://wp.me/p42pSs-ow

Aletheia is a Greek word variously translated as "unclosedness", "unconcealedness", "disclosure" or "truth".

The literal meaning of the word ἀ–λήθεια is "the state of not being hidden; the state of being evident" and it also implies "sincerity", as well as "factuality" or "reality".

In the early to mid 20th-century, Martin Heidegger brought renewed attention to the concept of aletheia, by relating it to the notion of disclosure, or the way in which things appear as entities in the world. While he initially referred to aletheia as "truth", (specifically a form of which that is pre-Socratic in origin), Heidegger eventually corrected this interpretation, writing:

To raise the question of aletheia, of disclosure as such, is not the same as raising the question of truth. For this reason, it was inadequate and misleading to call aletheia, in the sense of opening, truth."

Heidegger gave an etymological analysis of aletheia, and drew out an understanding of the term as 'unconcealedness' ( - nothing hidden?).

Heidegger focused on the elucidation of how an ontological "world" is disclosed, or opened up, in which things are made intelligible for human beings in the first place, as part of a holistically structured background of meaning.

Heidegger also wrote that "Aletheia, disclosure thought of as the opening of presence, is not yet truth. Is aletheia then less than truth? Or is it more because it first grants truth as adequatio (the way things really are) and certitudo (the essence of a thing), because there can be no presence and presenting outside of the realm of the opening?"

  A painting that reveals (alethe) a whole world. Heidegger mentions this particular work of Van Gogh's, Shoes, 1888, in "The Origin of the Work of Art".

For more on his understanding of aletheia, see Poetry, Language, and Thought, in particular the essay entitled "The Origin of the Work of Art", which describes the value of the work of art as a means to open a "clearing" for the appearance of things in the world, or to disclose their meaning for human beings. Heidegger revised his views on aletheia as truth, after nearly forty years, in the essay "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," in On Time and Being.

[butwhyamimetoo]

Message to Tories about Oxfam advert (by chunkymark) A MUST LISTEN!!!

[butwhyamimetoo]

This is NOT austerity. THIS is a fucking ROBBERY.

This is NOT austerity. THIS is a fucking ROBBERY. The combined fortune of Britain's richest 1,000 people has hit a new high of £519bn – equivalent to a third of the nation's economic output, and do...

[butwhyamimetoo]

The possibility of political pleasure: David Graeber at TEDxWhitechapel (by TEDx Talks)

[butwhyamimetoo]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/05/britain-land-of-impunity-fat-cats-politicians

WELCOME TO BRITAIN, THE NEW LAND OF IMPUNITY

No matter the criticisms made or damage done, fat cats and politicians seem able to cling on. Often their efforts are rewarded

What do you have to do to fall out of favour with this government? Last month, the security company G4S was quietly rehabilitated. It had been banned in August 2013 from bidding for government contracts after charging the state for tagging 3,000 phantom criminals. Those who had died before it started monitoring them presented a particularly low escape risk. G4S was obliged to pay £109m back to the government.Eight months later, and before an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office has concluded, back it bounces seeking more government business. Never mind that it almost scuppered the Olympics; never mind Jimmy Mubenga, an asylum seeker who died in 2010 after being “restrained” by G4S guards, or Gareth Myatt, a 15-year-old who died while being held down at a secure training centre in 2004; never mind the scandals at Oakwood, a giant prison it runs. G4S, described by MPs as one of a handful of “privately owned public monopolies”, is crucial to the government’s attempts to outsource almost everything. So it cannot be allowed to fail.

Was it ever banned at all? Six days after the moratorium was lifted, G4S won a contract to run HMRC services. A fortnight later it was chosen as one of the companies that will run the government’s Help to Work scheme. How did it win these contracts if in the preceding months it wasn’t allowed to bid?

In Brazil in the late 1980s, the country was widely described as o pais da impunidade – the land of impunity. What this meant was that there were no political consequences. Politicians, officials and contractors could be exposed for the most flagrant corruption, but they remained in post.

The worst that happened was early retirement with a fat pension and the proceeds of their villainy safely stashed offshore. It is beginning to look a bit like that here. This is not to suggest that the people or companies I name in this article are crooked or corrupt; it is to suggest that the political class no longer seems to care about failure.

(use the above link to read the rest).

[butwhyamimetoo]

Welsh artist, David Garner - They Shoot Children Don't They pt2, 2004

(Steel globe, video monitor, rope, blood-stained children’s clothes, clothes hanger, suicide bomber’s vest, extract from film ‘Jenin Jenin’)

[butwhyamimetoo]

The merest glance at the history of art reveals an abundance of work of the highest quality either directly occasioned by political events, or with an explicit political message: Michelangelo’s David for a start, commissioned by the city fathers of Florence to celebrate their liberation from the tyranny of the Medicis; or David’s The Death of Marat, or Goya’s Third of May, 1808, or Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, or El Lissitsky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge or Grosz’s satires on Wiemar or Heartfield’s anti- Fascist montages, or Rivera’s murals, or Zadkine’s Rotterdam War Memorial or Whiteread’s Closed Library holocaust memorial . And, in a different way, were not Rembrandt’s Beggars political? and Hals’ Alms House Regents and Blake’s Angels and Courbet’s Stone Breakers and Manet’s Olympia and Seurat’s Bathers and Van Gogh’s Peasants and Leger’s Cyclists and Builders and Warhol’s Electric Chairs and even (for those who actually got the point) Carl Andre’s Bricks? Indeed it is worth pointing out that Raphael’s Madonnas and Holbein’s Henry VIIIs and Rubens’ Baroque swirls and Van Dyke’s swagger portraits and Gainsborough’s gentry and Constable’s rural idylls and Bouguereau’s 19th century academic nudes and Dali’s post Spanish Civil War works and the Chapman Brothers’ Goya pastiches and paedophiliac mannequins, are also bearers of political values. Albeit values more or less diametrically opposed to those of my first two lists. Indeed the problem with all these lists is not how continue them but where to stop for, in the last analysis, all art - even Cezanne’s apples and Hirst’s dots – is political in that it gives visual expression (at least partially) to the outlook on life and ideology of one or other social group; even where the art appears to be profoundly individual, as in Blake or Giacommetti or Emin, it is in reality an individually mediated condensation of a collective social experience, as Paul Klee explained in his beautiful metaphor of the artist as tree trunk transmitting experience from its roots in the soil to its crown above.

From Ebbw Vale to the Muslim Veil, essay about the work of David Garner by John Molyneux

[butwhyamimetoo]

Absolutely amazing. Give it 5 minutes of your time. You won't be sorry.

[butwhyamimetoo]

turmoil

feeling let down

and torn to bits

nothing is clear to me

all i feel is I can't rely upon, trust, or feel safe

not feeling sorry for myself, just a realisation

that i exist in isolation

I need to look for some way to move on

it's getting on, too late

[artnet]

Ai Weiwei is censored, again: His name and work have been removed from a show in Shanghai about the history of Chinese contemporary art because of pressure from government cultural officials.

[mymodernmet]

Milan-based designer Andrea Minini creates elegant animal illustrations using a moiré pattern.

[opticallyaddicted]

 The Stunningly good Sculptures of  Richard A. Moore III

Richard A. Moore III www.rmooresculptures.com [email protected] Being born and raised in Portland, it felt only natural to pursue and obtain my BFA from Portland State University. My focus however, was painting. But about a year before I graduated, I realized that my talents and my ideas were far more compatible with sculpture. So after graduation, and with the exception of a few additional pieces of work, every bit of art I have made since then has been 3 dimensional in nature. And since I started sculpting after college, I have had to teach myself how to do it on my own. I’ve picked up tips and tricks from people here and there, but for the most part, when it comes to making the original clay models, I am entirely self taught. There are a few things however that I have learned from people that are on the technical end of the spectrum, such as welding, mold making and pouring bronze. My goal as a sculptor, as with most artists, is to be able to earn a living doing what it is I enjoy doing, making art. I do consider myself to be one of the lucky ones, and will continue to make sculptures well into the future, regardless. Like most artists, I make the things that I make because I am compelled to make them. Once I get it in my head to create something, I don’t stop until it’s finished. When sculpting, I prefer to render my work in a highly realistic way, often combining elements of surrealism and stylization. I try to find the perfect balance of classic sculpture, blended with a modern twist to create a seamless style, unique to myself. The size of my work has a wide range, from something you could hold in the palm of your hand, to my largest creation being well over nine feet tall. Along with trying to capture the physical grace of the human form, I also try and keep things interesting by capturing one of the more primal emotions that all people are capable of expressing. Richard A. Moore III

http://www.richardamoore3.com/#!

[butwhyamimetoo]

I am starting to understand

I am starting to understand that nothing is a waste of time, that every obstacle, every bad-minded, manipulative, needy, abusive individual, every apparent friend that fucks me over, every inconvenience, every broken relationship, every disappointment, all leads to here - to this very moment… and so far as I can determine, I am EXACTLY where I need to be - I just need to see the bigger picture.

[butwhyamimetoo]

My artwork "The System Sucks The Life From Me {Graduate Premium Myth}"

The artwork "The System Sucks The Life From Me {Graduate Premium Myth}" is made from a found object I rescued from the skips of a Cardiff reprographics company which produced marketing pop ups for university's recruiting campaigns and Welsh government departments, now defunct or re-branded and is my response to the many cuts and proposed cuts to education, services, budgets and so on brought about by the UK government’s austerity policies and my anxieties over the commodification of education.

On the issue of Student debt - People are easier to control, easier to manipulate when they are in debt.

On the myth of “the Graduate Premium” – which is reducing year on year, as tuition fees are going up and up.

A young graduate couple with joint debts upwards of £60,000 are not going to cause any employer any problems regardless of their diminishing employment rights and vicious tactics such as zero-hours contracts.

Recently (10/4/14) a report by the Huffington Post entitled “Students Will Still Be Paying Back Tuition Fee Loans In Their 50s, Study Warns” – covered the release of a report by the Sutton Trust.

(http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/04/10/students-will-paying-back-tuition-fee-loans-50s_n_5123387.html)

The Sutton Trust, which commissioned the research, said the findings showed that the new fee system could leave professionals such as teachers in a position where they have to find cash to cover loan repayments at a time when their family and living costs, such as mortgage payments, are at a peak.

Under major reforms of university finances, tuition fees were raised to a maximum of £9,000 a year in 2012, almost treble the previous fee which stood at around £3,000.

…higher education was meant to be about broadening ones knowledge, reading lots, meeting new people, and getting excited about ideas. However, it turned out that higher education is actually just about making yourself "more employable“ even, as happened to me, you are a returning mature student with long term health issues that made you unemployable a decade ago.

It's about fashioning yourself into a walking CV to compete for a stagnant pool of graduate jobs that are paid less in real terms every year, and taking on a rotten amount of debt in the process.

This week news quietly broke that the extra money a degree is supposed to earn you over the course of a lifetime – the “graduate premium” – is going down year on year, even as tuition fees are going up. Today’s students are paying nine times what was paid in 2007 and, according to one government adviser, up to 40% of the class of 2012 may default on their student loans.

Government policies are already having an effect on the way in which we experience and live our lives.

Whilst the implications of: 

the bedroom tax and

the growing necessity of food banks for daily living

has received a great deal of attention, there has been perhaps less focus on the continual chipping away of the cultural landscape that informs us and enriches us.

educational course closures,

huge student debts due to course fees,

overcrowding and reduction in quality of the student experience,

library closures,

gallery closures,

massive cuts and de-prioritising of the Arts in education,

curtailing of community and recreational facilities.

– our country is suffering from a form of ‘cultural vandalism’ which affects us all.

What is being lost today across so many communities will have profound, life changing, social implications now, tomorrow and for future generations.

[butwhyamimetoo]

The bill for military action in the past 24 years was £34.7billion. The true cost of Britain’s military operations since the Cold War could be as high as £72billion. Most of it has been squandered on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seen as ‘strategic failures’, claims a respected defence think-tank. John Miller, 63, the father of Royal Military policeman Corporal Simon Miller, who was murdered by a mob in Iraq in 2003, said: "It is disgusting. What have we actually achieved by spending that kind of money and losing that many troops’ lives in those conflicts? Nothing. Both places are worse off and hundreds of thousands of people are still being killed."