“Keep perfection as a crime”
“Context-Surfing”
“Arte es diferente a playa”
“Garum en el Frigidarium”
Illustrated Phrases
Quote: Baudrillard in Cool Memories
“Keep yourself as an other
Keep perfection as a crime
Keep illusion for the end
Keep on line for the while”
Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories III, p. 152
Quote: Naomi Wolf about the Fascist Shift in America
“Americans tend to see democracy and fascism as all-or-nothing categories. But it isn’t the case that there is a pure, static, ‘democracy’ in the white squares of a chessboard and a pure, static “fascism” in the black squares. Rather, there is a range of authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, and varieties of Fascist state, just as there are stronger and weaker democracies – and waxing and waning democracies. There are many shades of gray on the spectrum from an open to a closed society. (s. 20p)
[…]
Throughout this letter of warning, I will use the term fascist shift. It is a wording that describes a process. Both Italian and German fascisms came to power legally and incrementally in functioning democracies; both used legislation, cultural pressure, and baseless imprisonment and torture to progressively consolidate power. Both directed state terror to subordinate and control the individual […] Both were rabidly antidemocratic, not as a side sentiment but as the basis of their ideologies; and yet both aggressively used the law to pervert and subvert the law.
[…]
When I talk about a ‘fascist shift’ in America, I am talking about an antidemocratic ideology that uses the threat of violence against the individual to subdue the institutions of civil society so that they in turn can be subordinate to the power of the state.”
Naomi Wolf (2007): “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
The Hooded Jesus from Abu Ghraib
W. J .T. Mitchell, the renown Author of “The Pictorial Turn” has written a brilliant semiotic review of the HBO documentary The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.
“The Hooded Man reminds us of Jesus. A new kind of Jesus, admittedly, one whose tormented face is concealed from us, and whose poise at that moment was transformed by photography into an indelible icon of what a Christian nation accomplished in its crusade to liberate the Middle East”
W. J. T. Mitchell, The fog of Abu Ghraib: Errol Morris and the “bad apples”, In: Harper’s Magazine May 2008
Quote: Baudrillard - The Spirit of Terrorism
“We have to face facts, and accept that a new terrorism has come into being, a new form of action which plays the game, solely with the aim of disrupting it. Not only do these people not play fair, since they put their own deaths into play – to which there is no possible response (‘they are cowards’) – but they have taken over all the weapons of the dominant power. Money and stock-market speculation, computer technology and aeronautics, spectacle and the media networks – they have assimilated everything of modernity and globalism, without changing their goal, which is to destroy that power.”
Jean Baudrillard (2002): The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, p. 19
Zitat: Jean-François Lyotard
“Diejenigen, die es ablehnen, die Regeln der Kunst zu hinterfragen, machen Karriere dank des Konformismus der Massen, indem sie vermittels der ‘guten Regeln’ dem endemischen Verlangen nach Realität Objekte und Situationen liefern, die diese zu befriedigen vermögen.”
In: J. F. Lyotard: Was ist postmodern?
The Influencers 2008: Monochrom & Alan Abel in Barcelona
This weekend I attended the 4th edition of the “The Influencers“-Festival at the CCCB. The event describes itself as…
The talkshow you won’t see on TV! The Influencers explores controversial forms of art and communication guerrilla, presenting independent projects that play with global popular culture, infiltrate the mass media, and transform fashions, consumption and technological fetishism.
I was not able to see all of the lectures, but it started on Thursday with a very mediocre talk of the US-American interactive artist Brody Condon.
On Saturday, Johannes Grenzfurthner of the collective monochrom from Vienna held a brilliant presentation. He described monochrom’s subversive approach of irritating the contemporary neoliberal discourse with the distribution of post-modern ideas: “context hacking” is how they call it.
Then, Alan Abel, the Godfather of hoaxes, talked about his experience of the last 60 years as a prankster. With a lot of anecdotes about his recent activities – like the campaign to ban breast-feeding – he managed to entertain all of us!
I recommend checking out the festival’s website because they host most of the presentations as flashvideos online – for example when the Yes Men Group visited them in 2005.
Ciao Baudrillard, ciao Virtuality
Post-structuralism has lost one of his most influential thinkers: Jean Baudrillard, mind-father of simulacra and simulation died this Tuesday, March 6th.
With his comments on the 1991 Gulf War he gained broad public attention as a political commtator: He claimed the war to be a ‘virtual war’, that ‘did not take place’ due to the mediatic representation and its lack of consequences.