Category Archives: politics
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
bell hooks (1994)
Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.
An Indigenous Present
Edited by Jeffrey Gibson (2023)
This landmark volume is a gathering of Native North American contemporary artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, designers and more. Conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, a renowned artist of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, An Indigenous Present presents an increasingly visible and expanding field of Indigenous creative practice.
It centers individual practices, while acknowledging shared histories, to create a visual experience that foregrounds diverse approaches to concept, form and medium as well as connection, influence, conversation and collaboration. An Indigenous Present foregrounds transculturalism over affiliation and contemporaneity over outmoded categories.
Seed Pods of Democracy
Democracy Poster Project (2024)
The Democracy Poster Project explores the value of democracy and human rights through the visual art medium of posters, and proposes ways that design can act as a voice for participation in society. The Democracy Poster Project team (director Moon Jung Jang, along with curators Kyungwon Kim and Yumi Kang) contacted designers, illustrators, and visual artists around the world who have consistently expressed interest in issues of democracy and human rights, and who could disseminate these messages concisely and accurately through poster work.
In response, 51 participating artists (or teams of artists) crafted messages in different visual languages, producing 100 new posters and generating accompanying texts.
Participating artists acutely point out the reality of democracy’s retreat across various times and spaces and constantly ask questions about the causes. In addition, they address the core values of democracy such as equality, diversity of existence, and minority human rights, as well as structural discrimination and violence against women, the right to movement of the disabled, the right to work in a humane environment, and the right of refugees and immigrants to be respected. Their thoughts and expressions about resistance to the advancement of democracy and human rights, freedom through struggle, and methods for open empathy and solidarity continue to form complex and solid links.
Participating artists include designers and visual artists who represent the voice of the here and now through their various works and exhibitions at major art museums, including Karo Akpokiere, Kim Albrecht, Jonathan Barnbrook, Melinda Beck, Diana Ejaita, Mark Gowing, Guerrilla Girls, High on Type, Saki Ho, Minho Kwon, Sang Mun, This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll, Garth Walker, Kateryna Korolevtseva, Elaine Lopez, Studio Rejane Dal Bello, and others from around the world. Participants also include illustrators of social and cultural issues for influential media outlets and organizations such as The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Amnesty International.
In addition, the writings of invited authors Jung Keun-Sik, Kim Sang-kyu, Keiko Sei, and Ezio Manzini have also been compiled to ponder the questions “How do we represent issues of violence in movements for democracy and human rights?” “What does it mean to visually remember a history of violence by the state, and what are the possibilities and limitations of such visual expression?” “Where is activism currently taking place in visual culture and today?” and “What can design do for democracy?”
Posted in art, culture, design, exhibition, politics
Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us
Legacy Russell (2024)
In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.
Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed Jet magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights.
Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how a citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. And the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme.
Through imagery, memory and technology Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.
Posted in art, culture, history, media, photography, politics, printmaking, semiotics, technology, theory
Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics
Edited by Louis Marchesano (2020)
German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) is known for her unapologetic social and political imagery; her representations of grief, suffering, and struggle; and her equivocal ideas about artistic and political labels. This volume explores Kollwitz’s obsessive printmaking experiments with the evolution of her images, and assesses the unusually rich progressions of preparatory drawings, proofs, and rejected images behind Kollwitz’s compositions of struggling workers, rebellious peasants, and grieving
mothers.
Posted in art, biography, exhibition, politics, printmaking
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
adrienne maree brown (2017)
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.
Posted in culture, philosophy, politics
Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews
Krzysztof Wodiczko (1999)
Krzysztof Wodiczko, one of the most original avant-garde artists of our time, is perhaps best known for the politically charged images he has projected onto buildings and monuments from New York to Warsaw–images of rockets projected onto triumphal arches, the image of handcuffed wrists projected onto a courthouse facade, images of homeless people in bandages and wheelchairs projected onto statues in a park from which they had been evicted. Critical Vehicles is the first book in English to collect Wodiczko’s own writings on his projects. Wodiczko has stated that his principal artistic concern is the displacement of traditional notions of community and identity in the face of rapidly expanding technologies and cultural miscommunication. In these writings he addresses such issues as urbanism, homelessness, immigration, alienation, and the plight of refugees. Fusing wit and sophisticated political insight, he offers the artistic means to help heal the damages of uprootedness and other contemporary troubles.
Posted in architecture, art, culture, design, interview, media, philosophy, politics, technology
Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture
Edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (1990)
Out There addresses the question of cultural marginalization – the process through which various groups are excluded from access to and participation in the dominant culture. It is a wide-ranging anthology that juxtaposes diverse points of view on issues of gender, race, sexual preference, and class. It takes up the fundamental issues raised when we attempt to define concepts such as “mainstream” and “minority,” and it opens up new ways of thinking about culture and representation in our society.
Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man
Joseph Beuys (1993)
Joseph Beuys, artist and scholar, was the most influential thinker among artists of the postwar generation. He inspired the avant-garde with his impassioned appeals for democratic anarchy, and actually founded a string of ‘free universities’ across Europe. His credo was “Every man is an artist.” In 1974, he accepted an invitation to visit the U.S. His travels too him to New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis, and he called the trip – fact an extended performance piece – “Energy Plan for the Western Man.” Beuys’ writings have never before been collected in any language, and most of the interviews and speeches in Joseph Beuys in America have never before appeared in book form.
Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America
Lucy Lippard (1990)
In America today there is a little-known explosion of creative art by women and men from many different ethnic backgrounds. Mixed Blessings is the first book to discuss the crosscultural process taking place in the work of Latino, Native-, African-, and Asian-American artists. Rich with illustrations of artworks in many different mediums, and filled with incisive quotes and unsettling reports, it is more than a book about art, it is a complex meditation on the relationships of people to their cultures.