FacingTheCurrent

Facing The Current - Encounters with Contemporary Art FacingTheCurrent is a blog on contemporary art and culture - subjectively sharing all random and planned encounters with the vast current of the current (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-40943702-1', 'tumblr.com'); ga('send', 'pageview');

[facingthecurrent-blog]

Our cultural creative work is now entirely purpose-oriented. We do not think up for ourselves any cultural work that does not pursue some definitive practical aim. The concepts of ‘pure science’, 'pure art’, and ‘self-valuable truths and beauties’ are foreign to us. We are practicians, - and in this lies the distinguishing feature of our cultural consciousness.

Osip Brik (1888-1945), ‘From Picture to Calico-Print’. Originally published in LEF, no. 6, Moscow, 1924. 

Written in constructivist-productivist Russian times, almost precisely a full century ago. Did we just go a clean 180, with the current general critique on (Dutch) neoliberal policy instrumentalising the arts into something ‘useful’? 

[facingthecurrent-blog]

[...] Slechts kortstondig was hij van het Europese toneel verdwenen. Nadat de Griekse oud-minister van Financiën afgelopen zomer was opgegeten en uitgespuugd door het Europese establishment (‘I wear their loathing with pride’, verklaarde hij naderhand) is hij nu terug met een missie om Europa te democratiseren. Niet als politicus ditmaal, maar als activist. In de Volksbühne op de Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (de symbolische lading is geen toeval) lanceert hij vanavond een pan-Europese burgerbeweging: DiEM25, voluit Democracy in Europe Movement 2025. Het doel is om de macht terug te winnen van de starre Brusselse technocraten en de Europese Unie voor haar eigen ondergang te behoeden. De ‘machten van Europa’ zijn als de dood voor ware democratie, zo staat te lezen in het manifest van DiEM25. In de ogen van Varoufakis cum suis fungeert het Europese besluitvormingsproces als een zwart gat waarin alle politieke strijdpunten verdwijnen. Beslissingen worden gepresenteerd als technische, neutrale maatregelen, waarover geen discussie mogelijk is. De beweging van Varoufakis geeft zichzelf een decennium om daar verandering in te brengen. In 2025 moet hun missie volbracht zijn. Het motto: ‘De EU zal gedemocratiseerd worden, of ze zal desintegreren.’ [...]

[facingthecurrent-blog]

Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

[facingthecurrent-blog]

Just weeks after it was announced that art history A-level was to be dropped – an act described by the historian Simon Schama as “a big dull axe wielded by cultural pygmies” – the government has said that the qualification will be saved after all.

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[...] And now, finally, rather than suffer the pretense of progress under a female president, America has voted for Trump. Good. Lay bare the racism, lay bare the arrogance, lay bare the lies and the brutalities. Face yourselves, see yourselves, and then maybe, maybe, things will change…

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The AIM singer has provided designs and logos to create shirts and hoodies that won't be ‘destroying (the) environment and enslaving peeps’

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If we are against racism and unaware of committing racist acts, we can’t be racist; racism and being a good person have become mutually exclusive. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.

[facingthecurrent-blog]

De leraars die mij het meeste bijbrachten, volgden niet nauwgezet de eindtermen, maar waren net meesters in het omzeilen van het opgelegde curriculum

http://www.demorgen.be/opinie/leve-de-tegendraadse-leraar-saboteer-idiote-regels-en-kleur-buiten-de-lijntjes-b9dba4a6/

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The Open Knowledge Library will [ed. woúld] be the digital repository of lessons, lectures, curricula and student work from Britain’s nurseries, schools, colleges and universities. We will require the findings of all state-funded research to be made available without charge to the general public through this learning portal.

http://www.thecanary.co/2016/08/30/jeremy-corbyn-just-announced-plan-end-one-biggest-scams-modern-history/

[facingthecurrent-blog]

In a single lifetime humanity has become a planetary-scale geological force

Most other geologic epochs, which are defined by world-changing events such as mass extinctions, have lasted millions of years or even tens of millions of years. But humans have found a way to disrupt the Earth’s natural patterns, and many geologists think it’s high time this impact be made official.

[facingthecurrent-blog]

At the New Inquiry, Evan Calder Williams writes about how "natural" disasters like the recent earthquake in Italy reveal the unevenly distributed exposure to death in the society affected3. While we typically think of earthquakes or hurricanes as indiscriminate in their destructive power, they affect the poor and vulnerable much more than the rich and powerful.

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[...] Holiday Sale! Artist Statement Templates! TEMPLATE 1: The Trauma/ Disaster/Beauty Artist Statement $11.99 Step 1: talk about how beauty and horror are intertwined Step 2: use phrase “comparatively restrained, but no less powerful” Step 3: use words “elegiacal” and “haunting” Step 4: describe narratives of “identity, mortality, loss and love” TEMPLATE 2: The Post-Feminist Slut/Voyeur Artist Statement $17.99 Step 1: talk about how your subjectivity is formed in the wake of post-feminism Step 2: use your fairly attractive body in all your work, photographed in skimpy underwear & rollerskates—it’s okay to look slutty becuz you're a feminist interrogating self-objectification Step 3: DON'T WEAR MAKE-UP. It will cause you to not be taken seriously "conceptually". DO WEAR SKIMPY UNDERWEAR. It will make your work sell like hotcakes. Step 4: talk about how you are problematizing the traditional relationship between spectator and on-screen fetish object Step 5: end with the phrase “an unsettling dance of seduction, power, trust, tenderness, loss, and betrayal” [...]

[facingthecurrent-blog]

Het loslaten van chronologie hoeft niet automatisch te impliceren dat afgezien wordt van iedere historische duiding, of het nu een culturele of kunsthistorische samenhang betreft dan wel een maatschappelijke context. Wat betreft collectiepresentatie is de grootste uitdaging voor hedendaagse musea om een alternatief te vinden voor zowel de vertrouwde, rechtlijnige chronologie, als voor de gefragmenteerde opeenvolging van individuele kunstenaars. Mede in respons op wat in de globaliserende kunstwereld gaande is, gaat het erom de complexiteit van artistiek pluralisme (trouwens ook waar het de kunst van vóór 1960 betreft) op zowel zijn temporele als zijn geografische aspecten te onderzoeken. Er kan gekeken worden naar verschillen tussen generaties kunstenaars en tussen kunstenaars van dezelfde generatie, maar meer nog zou er oog moeten zijn voor mondiale en lokale samenhangen, evenals voor cross-overs van kunstdisciplines of van hoge kunst en populaire cultuur. Dat is de problematiek waar het Stedelijk zijn tanden in zou moeten zetten.

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Robotic ray, made from a melding of tissue and technology, powered by light-activated rat cells.

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Als wij kinderen en kunst echt serieus nemen, gaat er een wereld voor ons open. Kunstonderwijs dus: op elk leerniveau, op zwarte en op witte scholen, aan christenen, moslims, hindoes en atheïsten. Het biedt een remedie tegen de Waarheid, die elke verbeelding in ons doodt.

https://www.knaw.nl/nl/de-knaw/akademie-van-kunsten/kunst-in-het-onderwijs/kunstonderwijs-2013-een-vaccin-tegen-waarheid

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[...] The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism. In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations. With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia. [...]