hey images from new shows at physics room. erica van zon's is the shit. brilliant facsimmile reports from the front line of mediated culture. something about tourism, delay culture of modernity and postmodernity lag as processed from colonial culture. the overlapping of rome olympic's poster with visit isreal promotion poster, both pinned to boards is about nothing else other than the continual conflict within humanitirian values and cilivistaion's epoch as "Western civilisation". Apathy and privledge also play their parts in James Oram and Tjaling de Vries work. Oram's Stay down is absolutely keen in its nipping at its heels pressure mingled alongside the self depreacting rhetoric of perfromance anxiety and while de Vries re-works the no-exit, Jean Paul Satre experience of Ronnie Van Hout's 2003 shows* it's still a brilliant interface for the iterant public viewing that The Physics Room's Kiosk allows... jon dory. *van hout 2003: http://www.physicsroom.org.nz/gallery/2003/vanhout/

CARRIE MAE WEEMSA SURVEY

February 7 - March 8, 2008

Opening reception for the artist, Thursday, February 7th, 6 - 8 pm

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Carrie Mae Weems, A Survey, the artist's inaugural exhibition at the gallery and her first exhibition in New York in several years. Although she has exhibited her work extensively throughout the United States and abroad over the past twenty-five years this exhibition marks Weems' highly anticipated return to the New York gallery scene. A Survey brings together work from the beginning of her career through her most recent projects produced in Rome, where she was a fellow at the American Academy in 2005/2006, as well as other series from Europe and Louisiana. This exhibition celebrates the breadth of Weems' career and highlights her overall trajectory toward enfranchisement and empowerment through photography. What becomes noticeable is Weems' penchant for storytelling. Her work is organized into cohesive bodies which function like chapters in a perpetually unfolding narrative. It begins autobiographically with her earliest series of family portraits, evolves into a more general exploration of African American cultural identity rooted in American Icons, exploration of color, slavery, Africa, and the appropriation of historical ethnographical images, before morphing and expanding into a mediation on Western history, art history, architecture and its implications for power structures. Weems' use of props as installation elements further accentuates her interest in stories, folklore and drama. An installation becomes like a stage set and her practice like that of a director. Some examples of Weems' video work, where she fully exploits this role, will also be on view.Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated yearning, loss, cultural identity, and the visual consequences of power throughout her renowned career. Determined as ever to enter the picture-both literally and metaphorically-she has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse.Carrie Mae Weems earned her BA from the California Institute of the Arts, an MFA from the University of California at San Diego, and she studied folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of the 2005/2006 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship, and was awarded the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography and the Visual Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been represented at DAK'ART, the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Dakar, Senegal, and the Johannesburg Biennale in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has had solo and group shows at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University, the International Center of Photography, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum. Her work is included in both public and private collections, including the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Black Magic and the Index of Knowledge
THE END OF ART AND OF ART HISTORY
by Rudolph Hudsucker

Let us not talk falsely now
For the hour is getting late
- Bob Dylan, ‘All Along the Watchtower’

7.
Reading Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, written shortly before the radical thinker committed suicide by the border in Nazi-occupied France in 1940, is like falling through a philosophical pothole. Rereading it is as if to have an urgent stranger subtly whispering in one’s ear. Written with nothing to lose and staring destiny blankly in the face, Benjamin so lucidly critiques Capitalist society and where it’s heading, that it can be frustrating, to say the least, to be some 60 plus years on and seemingly no more prepared for the ‘state of emergency’ which Benjamin urges us is not the exception, but the rule. But try telling that to the bourgeoisie! Yes Fascism. Benjamin laughs out loud how people, in lieu of signed-sealed-and-delivered progress, can be so surprised that such barbarous acts can still be happening, in 1940. And OH my lord, it’s happening again. What a surprise! Clement Greenberg writes of how the bourgeoisie spawned the avant-garde but then cut it adrift, like a cultural orphan cast out into the cold. But the chickens are coming home to roost.

And as for art? What a bore! Duchamp was in no two minds as to its futility in the mid 20th Century. Max Ernst complained of the exiled European avant-garde living it up like movie stars in New York. And so the art-world continues on as a self-righteous sham, reduced to white cubes and beauty parades for the petty bourgeoisie. How pathetic! And just as our political commentators have become like eunuchs our cultural commentators spout out starbucksafied post modern theory and chit chat about ‘pluralism’ over tim tams and a late. Meanwhile Benjamin’s storm continues brewing.

6.
Raymond Spiteri writes of how the energies of Surrealism were so vital to Benjamin’s development and situation as some one torn between the desire for political action and the ‘trappings’ of his position as an avant-garde intellectual, a life of the mind in a mindless and mechanical age. It was ‘profane illumination’ Benjamin sought and it’s time to fulfill that promise now for a generation with nothing, and no property, to lose. And how weak and pathetic the left has been in stemming the coming tide. What a time bomb to be cast in the next generation’s pram. And just how scary, how far we’ve embraced this machinery, how complicit we’ve been in what et al. identifies as our ‘grand mass illusion’. How eloquently do we need to state our case? How radical do you wish us to become? How much more radical will you make us by the hour?

And art, fucking art, let’s get back to that. Europe today is in a deep slumber. Reagan when he came to power wanted to reduce national arts funding by 50%. He still managed to throw the whole game into the hands of the cigarette and oil companies. Duchamp knew the game was up. The future great artists will have to come from the underground, he predicted. Warhol, when asked the future of art, answered one word, ‘political’. Kraftwerk put out a song with the chorus, ‘Radioactivity, is in the air for you and me’, and the numbskull left didn’t get the irony and accused it of being pro nuclear power. Art, Benjamin tells us, is what it became after being removed from the realm of the cult to the realm of exhibition. John Berger has made hay of the relationship between painting and private property. Now we’re living in the virtual world and art has played more than its share in producing the dark fantasy which now so intoxicates us. A spell of blindness, total satisfaction guaranteed. Baudrillard said Western capitalist society is in the process of forgetting everything.

We have been alienated, reinvented and our artists have been co-opted into fighting over crumbs, for the dumb machinery, the economic apparatus that we are one with in perfect intolerable unity. Our language has been destroyed. Even a simple phrase like ‘I’m lovin’ it’ now sends a shiver up one’s spine. Serious action is required. Baudrillard wrote of terrorism in regards to signs and language. ‘The force of the terrorists comes precisely from the fact that they have no logic’. A language attack could ‘make the system collapse under an excess of reality.’

All that stands between us and non-violent success is the ego or rather the egos, electronically transmitted, broadcasted and controlled through the new technology. Everywhere you look, god-damn individuals expressing their unique individualities. You’re the One babe. It’s You. And dude, you look just like David Beckham. A population that doesn’t know how to dance, party or fuck, but is dressed up to the tee and wearing Calvin Klein. Self-censorhip, programming, reality manufactured so blatantly. And the god-damn mystery of it all, Yeah Right! Benjamin was so brilliant in sabotaging his own chances with the academy and set a stellar model for generations to come. He identified Andre Breton as the first to embrace the outmoded, the discarded, the unwanted. Fascism has made aesthetics political, he said. And what a cess pool it’s become.

3.
Semiotexte began publishing French critical theory with the aim of short-circuiting complicity between radical culture and conservative institutions of taste. Even one of Benjamin’s biggest supporters, Adorno, couldn’t help himself from editing out parts of Benjamin’s thought that didn’t tow the orthodox Marxist line. There’s a high price to pay for independence and Benjamin paid it fully, but when you know reality’s a sham, what’s there to lose? As Europe was crumbling Benjamin risked everything to stick around and study the ruins. He studied the extremes rather than the middle norms. He realized how hostile the bougousie is to any radical free thought. To think is to be asocial. To conform is to play your role in the one dumb Hollywood movie almost the whole world is sitting stupefied by. Freedom, this absurd humanist freedom that Nietzche so effectively destroyed more than a hundred years ago, is still the order of the day. And how distracted we have become from the class struggle as if we were sitting at the end of history in our new advanced selves.

‘Art’ is against the law. Or at least it has been sucked dry of all meaning. In Wellington, Massey University is now the ‘Creative Campus’. The Dowse has spent a boat-load of money only to tackify the gallery and put it firmly in the hands of corporate dollars. Apparently King Kong is art these days. And the serious artists, as always, aren’t invited to the party. It’s the illusion-makers that succeed. And artists must abandon art if there is any hope of truly succeeding. Power adapts and re transmogrifies. Foucault expanded so vividly on much of Benjamin’s project. But the new systems of control while blindingly effective are ever-vulnerable. And as Chomsky says, the right only too well know it. There is no art now, only politics.

0.
We need to reclaim Benjamin’s ritualism. He was ritualistic about everything, the paper he used, the pencils, he never subjected himself fully to the typewriter. Today artists write directly into computers as if throwing onions into a food processor. And they wonder why it all comes out the same. Benjamin’s Arcade’s project revealed just how swiftly industrial production came to dominate the service of our ‘artistic’ talent. Today artists are more like interior decorators or cheap hucksters taking their phony bag of tricks from town to town, or biennale to biennale. The biennale makes one nostalgic for the museum or ready to vomit over all of it. Language needs to sweep through our entire intellectual system like an uncontrollable virus. It’s never been easier to disrupt the technological apparatus and strike astonishment and fear into the minds of the technocrats who run it. The system is all built on self-interest and when all is chaos the cronies won’t bark to their commands. The magic trick is being discovered. Our political puppets are losing confidence in the tautness of their strings.

And art may belong to the modern state and die along with it too. The cultural spoils of the victors have been paraded to the point of being ridiculous. Human consciousness and language will evolve to a point of un-containment. The masters will not know how to give the orders. The ones who have been made invisible will benefit from the invisibility. The visible will be the ones to the see the growing crack in the mirror. Nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide. Programmed reality will begin to pixilate uncontrollably. The corporations will collapse and the invisible shall dance wildly around the camp fire. Human consciousness will all be sucked into the black hole of destiny. A million sensations will flood into the senses and we shall realise we have been living with cotton wool in our ears and sand in our eyes. Benjamin studied the extreme and believed in it. He knew that is the only way will grow and survive. We need to stop persecuting our radical edges in the interest of ushering everything into the middle. The middle is only an illusion. And it is an illusion that is running our of steam.

Some References
Benjamin, Walter, Theses on the Philosophy of History.
Benjamin, Walter, Reflections, Schocken Books, 1978
Ed. Kraus, Chris & Lotringer, Sylvere, Hatred of Capitalism, Semiotexte.
Petropoulos, Jonathan, The Faustian Bargain, The Art World in Nazi Germany, Penguin
Ed. Preziosi, Donald, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 1998.
Ed. Smith, Gary, On Walter Benjamin, MIT Press
Spiteri, Raymond, Bengamin’s Snapshot of Surrealism: Metaphor, Image and Action, unpublished

heyyou get those compact listen cds?????????attached:

best work from hsp xmas auction: justin kerr. free giveaway - almost five hundred copies of pirates of the carribean "worlds end".priceless in its concise berivity and charitable spirit and a perfect follow up to his wishbone in the forestraunt show a month earlier.

White Fungus Now On-Sale throughout Canada and the US

New Zealand experimental arts magazine White Fungus is now on-sale throughout Canada and the US, distributed by Disticor. The irreverent independent publication, which is an edgy mix of experimental music, visual art, literature and politics, has previously been on-sale at a handful of North American outlets but this is the first time it will be widely available.

Current issue, number 8, kicks off with an in-depth history article on early 20th Century radical Maori prophet Rua Kenana who created his own community in the heart of Ureweras, resisting European domination, until the peaceful community was violently broken up by the State in 1916. The Ureweras, a remote mountain area deep in central North Island, remain home to the Tuhoe people who never signed the country’s historic Treaty of Waitangi or ceded their sovereignty to the European state. In 2007 Tuhoe were again made victims of state aggression when the New Zealand Police invoked for the first time our new anti-‘terror’ legislation.

White Fungus Issue 8 is the biggest edition yet and includes an in-depth article on Portland experimentalists Smegma - featuring interviews with Dr ID, Ju Suk Reet Meate and Oblivia - writing on Auckland artists Rohan Wealleans and Richard Orjis and the esoteric installations or sculptures of Sydney artist Mikala Dwyer. The issue includes new photography by Taipei artist Isa Ho, an interview conducted by Singapore poet Cyril Wong with sound artist Ang Song Ming, new poems by Vivienne Plumb, Harry McNaughton and Lina ramona Vitkauskas (co-editor of Milk). German writer and co-editor of Tokafi Tobias Fischer writes on the subtle sublime music of early minimalist Hans Otte and argues that it is vastly under-appreciated. The issue is book-ended with an interview with leading New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager whose groundbreaking 2006 book The Hollow Men led to the resignation of then Conservative leader Don Brash and exposed in unpresidented detail the inner-workings and manipulations of a modern cynical political campaign.

White Fungus was launched in Wellington in late 2004 as a free-photocopied handout attacking the mayor and her property- developer husband in the lead-up to local body elections. It has since developed into a high quality print publication embracing a broad range of interdisciplinary content from New Zealand and around the world. The magazine was founded by brothers Ron Hanson and Mark Hanson after the pair had recently returned from Taiwan where they lived for four years. The name of the publication comes from a canned food product the brothers discovered in their local Taichung City Supermarket in 2003.

White Fungus is now on sale-throughout North America. To order copies for retail please contact your supplier or Disticor for further information. For enquiries outside North America, please contact retail@whitefungus.com

For more information on White Fungus please contact the editor Ron Hanson at editor@whitefungus.com

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