| яалинакабаева

Russian glamour. Feminist icons. Alina Kabaeva? Pussy Riot? Sharapova? Commodification of appearance, cultural capital and protest. Human Rights. Contemporary art. Putin's monuments to fascism. Aesthetics. Politics. Resistance. Failure

[iamalinakabaeva]

Ethical claims of contemporary art?

Today at the talk by Victoria Ivanova, one of the questions raised was on ethical claims of contemporary art, and questioning of the aims of “contemporary art regime”. Ivanova looks at human rights and contemporary as “regimes of mediation“ for market liberalism using Foucault’s regimes of knowledge, and in relation to system analysis and ecology of the institutions. Both regimes rely on and reproduce the concept of a universal individuating subject, both work around individual freedom to unrecognised claims.

Going back to ethical, one of the questions for me is weather it could be possible to produce art institutions that have strong ethics and values to them? For example co-operative organisations that act according to co-operative principles? Trading co-ops have an ambiguous relation to market, however all co-operative organisations have strong element of common ownership in their basic structure. What would that kind of institutions do? Would those institutions become “critical institutions”?

One of the other things that seemed interesting was a claims of different sides of existence of contemporary art that can be divided between reputational and market success. Victoria had a very good point on the legitimacy that left-siding critical practice works as sanctioned opposition and helps to reproduce the system around those notions of criticality. Role of not-for-profit art organisations and projects funded though governmental funds can be interesting to discuss in relation to that.

What also touches me here is that plenty of critical practices rely on the free “feminized” labour of love that is put by artists into artistic practice. It seems to be making sense to get back to investigate this in relation to ethical claims...

[iamalinakabaeva]

Suhail Malik’s four talks and discussions

Contemporary art’s shortcomings are increasingly evident even with respect to its own purported ambitions: proposing alternatives to homogenizing, normative conventions; as a method or mechanism of escape from the standardizations and conventions set by large-scale, commercial-corporate, or institutionally secured forms of recognition; as a site of utopian proposals, and so on. These imperatives impose themselves yet more severely when contemporary art itself establishes such norms and institutional figures. The effort is then made to escape art as we have it, perhaps for a more valid, more immediate, perhaps more populist or accessible kind of art which, for that reason, would have yet greater critical-political traction than institutionalized art. The now-familiar emphases on public participation, nonart, smuggling, deterritorialisation, inbetweenness, eventhood, indeterminacy, deskilling, etc. all heed this imperative. But as re-iterations of the logic of escape, these efforts also perpetuate and entrench the very limitations of art they seek to overcome. The resulting interminable endgame of art’s critical maneuvers serves after a short moment to provide new paradigmatic exemplars for it, a condition of tamed instability that characterizes contemporary art today well enough. This series proposes that for art to have substantial and credible traction on anything beyond or larger than itself, it is necessary to exit contemporary art. An exit that requires the revocation of contemporary art’s logic of escape. If the demand here has an appeal and deserves attention—and it need not since the current constitution of contemporary art serves very well the aesthetic, intellectual, and sociological forms that sustain prevalent power in and through the art field, including all prevalent forms of critique—then this demand must be placed not just on the art itself but also on the ideas it invokes, as well as the social structures and ethos sustaining this configuration. The question then is what this art other to contemporary art’s paradigm of escape can be? What other kind of social structure and distribution of power than that prevalent in contemporary art would support it? What should an art that is not contemporary art do? Of what would its traction consist and amount to?

[iamalinakabaeva]

Mediating Freedom: Human Rights and Contemporary Art

VICTORIA IVANOVA: Mediating Freedom: Human Rights and Contemporary Art Human rights and contemporary art are both inscribed into larger projects of global ordering. From producing archetypes of universal subjecthood to organising how agency, ethics and reality are conceived, both have historically functioned as image-makers for different strands of the global liberal project. This talk contends that despite all of their institutional, discursive and operational distinctiveness, both regimes rely on and reproduce the concept of a universal individuating subject. Furthermore, as sociopolitical difference and ambiguity have increasingly become the norm, the contemporary art regime has effectively stepped into the shoes of the human rights project as the dominant framework for understanding the relationship between subjecthood and reality. The talk assesses the functions and limitations of both systems' mediating powers, and considers their relevance in dealing with the leading issues we face today. Bio: Victoria Ivanova is currently Assistant Curator for Public Programmes at Tate. She has previously worked in the human rights field and co-founded a platform for contemporary culture in Donetsk, Ukraine, where she was responsible for strategy as well as setting up and curating the institution's artist-in-residence programme. Ivanova's publications on art include Turborealism: Neither Bow nor Arrow (co-edited with Agnieszka Pindera) and 'Art’s Values: A Détente, a Grand Plié' in Parse 2: The Value of Contemporary Art. GOLDSMITHS MFA FINE ART + MFA CURATING LECTURE SERIES. SERIES 2.1: POST-CONTEMPORARY Contemporary art, as the name says, is the art of its time: it belongs to the present in which it takes place. Moreover, that present is not just a moment of time but a (now global) societal organisation that art draws from and engages with. However, this limitation of contemporary art to the present-day means that art has lost the traction on futurity that historically typified the avant-gardes of modernism. In this, contemporary art deprives the present of having any direction at all. The overall directionlessness of contemporary art today - its multifariousness - is one index of this destruction of futurity.   Yet finance capitalism, the energy sector, the military, social media, artificial intelligence and big data, bioengineering and speculative theory are all now increasingly shaping the present by operationalising a relation to the future and its uncertainties. These institutional configurations can be called post-contemporary: they are - they will be - shaping the very forms of societal organisation that contemporary art claims to work from and which it claims to address. If contemporary art remains bound to the time of its making it misses - will miss - the changing futural dynamics of the present. The post-contemporary is happening now. In order to remain contemporary, contemporary art must then become post-contemporary. This series of lectures will examine how futurity can be deployed to that end.   ALL LECTURES TAKE PLACE IN LG02 PROFESSOR STUART HALL BUILDING. 17.30-19.00. FREE TO ATTEND.

[iamalinakabaeva]

'The Jungle': Christmas in a Refugee Camp, with Pussy Riot

Christmas Eve: You're cooking dinner, late to the party, get your leg tangled in a garland of Christmas tree lights, and knock the tree onto the cat. You come to the corporate party, dance till you...

Is there a dissident expiry date?

[iamalinakabaeva]

Co-owner of the India Art Fair, Sandy Angus told the Washington Post: “It is an iconic image because it is very political, human and involves an incredibly important artist like Ai Weiwei. “The image is haunting and represents the whole immigration crisis and the hopelessness of the people who have tried to escape their pasts for a better future.”

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/feb/01/ai-weiwei-poses-as-drowned-syrian-infant-refugee-in-haunting-photo

An art fair owner is a lgit source of refugee crisis [contemporary art market] moralism for the Guardian.

[iamalinakabaeva]

justified horror in her eyes

@electrovolk p.sure background figure intended to be UNDYNAMIC/missingout but am seeing justified horror in her eyes pic.twitter.com/PZcag1FvtZ

— k Wat (@mkhrvy) February 3, 2016

[iamalinakabaeva]

Advert in London tube - January 2016

[iamalinakabaeva]

[iamalinakabaeva]

The uprisings and protest movements of 2011 (the so-called Arab Spring, indignados, Occupy Wall Street, etc.) have been widely considered groundbreaking because of their leaderless structures. Owing to the absence of unequivocally leading figures, the symbolic and practical role of urban space has been emphasized in popular media and scholarship alike. Next to the widely circulated and discussed images of Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol, and Zucotti Park, however, another type of image has been prevalent, that of a revolutionary woman. In response to W.J.T. Mitchell’s article “Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation” (2012), I argue that the reasons for the focus of recent revolutionary imagery on women cannot be reduced to the allegedly feminine character of nonviolence, but are much more complex and entail far-reaching consequences. I engage with two images Mitchell quotes as iconic of the 2011 revolutions – the ballerina from the Occupy Wall Street poster and the “blue bra girl” beaten and disrobed by the military police in Tahrir Square – and discuss their cultural and historical significance. These two images, I argue, represent two major tropes prevalent in revolutionary iconography: woman as a symbol of revolutionary ideals and woman as a symbol of the failure of revolution. Further, I propose that revolutionary images centered on women, both real-life and fictional, belong to what Ariella Azoulay calls the “language of revolution”.

[iamalinakabaeva]

“a customer from the Urals city of Yekaterinburg submitted a photo portraying four young adults wearing balaclava masks while sitting on IKEA furniture to IKEA’s website. IKEA quickly pulled the image from the website. According to the Moscow Times, the company replaced it with the following statement:

“IKEA is a commercial organization that operates beyond politics and religion. We cannot allow our advertising project to be used as a means of propaganda of any kind.”

http://eurokulture.missouri.edu/ikea-refuses-to-make-political-statement-in-russia/

[iamalinakabaeva]

More Alekhina by Jordan Doner.

[iamalinakabaeva]

Interview With Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina - artnet News

Pussy Riot's Maria Alyokhina spoke to artnet News at WhiteBox gallery about the group's changing identity, future projects, and more.

Rather interesting, once again contemporary art show with Mother of God, Chase Putin Away! video. This time curated by Marat Guelman.

[iamalinakabaeva]

they are young, pretty and their cause of human rights is tangled in that of rock n’ roll... [..] For a group so aware of media-image, appropriation and misrepresentation, it's all the more bizarre why they’ve continued to participate in media spectacle. Perhaps they might still think these media acts are akin, at some level, to what they were engaged in Russian public space. The difference is that now they are in the "free world", allegedly without censorship or harassment, where you can speak the truth and say anything you want. If they are using their status as media darlings to make the plight of political prisoners visible, the method of delivery and the message attached to it are becoming increasing difficult to decipher. [...] Perhaps, it's the spectacle that directs them now, not otherwise. Like so many Russian exiles before them, Pussy Riot have become token dissidents, that western people will like to look at, and like to think their concern had a part in releasing them. Perhaps it is also about the endured suffering that makes for their revolutionary aura in the West [..] leaves no doubts on why they were easy pegs for western media, who have a thing for young, pretty and suffering women.[...]

Agata Pyzik, Pussy Riot's Political Message Has Turned Into Pure Media Spectacle

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/825-pussy-riots-political-message-has-turned-into-pure-media-spectacle/

[iamalinakabaeva]

Even a cursory glance at today's top celebrities detects certain trends: the significant role of Putin and his party, United Russia, in the life and allegiances of young, ambitious women such as Kabaeva and Volochkova. While seductive sirens enhance the party's appeal by lending it glamour, association with anything Putinated can only benefit the women's public profiles. Secondly, as throughout the world, the exposure of young, nubile bodies advances women's lucrative careers, which explains why not only Vodianova the ballet dancer capitalise on their physical endowments though advertising exclusive clothes and their naked flesh. Above all the decisive role of media in constructing  celebrity, the commodification of appearance, which in turn sells commodities, globalization though the internet, which provides instant access to multiple verbal, visual and musical genres and the eternal human thirst for glamorous icons thrives in Russia, as elsewhere in the western world.

Helena Goscilo and Vlad Strukov, Russian celebrities home and abroad: united under Putin, March 2011. Celebrity Studies Vol 2, No. 2, July 2011, 209-213, Routhlege

[iamalinakabaeva]

More on the subject of Greek and Roman inspired fascist art in Russia. Statue is make by some cossak artist (on a picture), and everything else is anonymous.

[iamalinakabaeva]

The enlightened artist today who makes himself available to the dictatorship can only toady and fool himself. The monuments to fascism, based on Greek, or Roman models, communicate nothing but plaster emptiness.

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Peter Weiss,Vol I, p 65

[iamalinakabaeva]

 Ok if someone wants a BBC journalist to reiterate again (in the style of a traditionalist writer or right-wing politician) that “Russia is different” watch this report on the Putin-Hercules art.

Anyway, this is about a year ago, and right before deciding to bomb Syria, Mr Cameron was urging his supporters we need to 'crush the head of the snake' when talking about ISIS. HERCULES POLITICS.