Editor and arts writer Paul Schmelzer first wrote this article for his blog Eyeteeth. It appears here on Groundswell with his permission.
Darfurnica (detail), Nadia Plesner, 2010
Dutch artist Nadia Plesner got in hot water with Louis Vuitton in 2008 for depicting an African child with one of its high-end bags on one arm and a chihuahua in the other (below) as part of her campaign urging divestment from Sudan over the conflict in Darfur. Now the company is suing her again: this time, the luxury goods company has filed a copyright infringement suit at The Hague that will penalize her 5,000 Euros for each day a likeness of its Audra bag in her painting Darfurnica remains on her website. The company has been tallying her penalty since Jan. 28.
Plesner’s Simple Living poster first drew Vuitton’s ire; his lawyers soon followed.
“The story about Darfur must be told, and I believe I should have my artistic freedom of speech to do so,” Plesner writes on her website.
Whereas the first legal kerfuffle with Vuitton ended in mid-2008 with Plesner agreeing to stop selling t-shirts bearing the handbag image, this time Plesner’s art is not merchandise to be sold but a work of fine art. Created to the same dimensions as painter Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a 1937 polemic against the carpet-bombing of the Basque town of the same name, the idea for Plesner’s piece hinged on news that officials decided to shroud Picasso’s famed painting in blue cloth during a 2003 UN press conference on the Iraq War by John Negroponte and Colin Powell.
“It is amazing that an art work can be considered so powerful, that it has to be covered up while governments present their plans,” Plesner writes. “It only proves that artists around the world must continue to work with the harsh issues to influence the people with power and to start important debates.”
That same year — 2003 — the genocide in Darfur started, she writes. “Politicians come up with new ways to try to hide from us that things stay the same.”
Despite a clearly artistic — and not commercial — intention behind the work, Louis Vuitton is seeking monetary penalties (220,000 Euros or roughly $307,000 and counting, with no ceiling on the penalty) and aims to prevent Plesner from exhibiting the painting either on her website or at venues in the European Union. (Here’s an unofficial English translation of the court order.)
Plesner, who now runs a foundation that raises funds for projects likesending medical equipment to Darfur or buying a vehicle for use at an orphanage in Tanzania, is lawyering up for her defense. Her opponents won’t need a fundraiser for its legal efforts: Louis Vuitton — aka LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton — had profits of $28.26 billion last year, and its chairman, Bernard Arnault, rose on Forbes’ billionaires list to world’s fourth-richest man, with a net worth of $41 billion.
But Plesner reportedly has an unorthodox ally. According to media reports and an image posted at Reddit (.png file), the hacktivist group Anonymous is launching a campaign against the company. The goal is to use “any non-physically violent method available to us to cause financial damage to Louis Vuitton.”
Big words? Perhaps, but Anonymous has reportedly been successful in launching distributed denial of service attacks against various entities, bringing down the websites of BMI (for its “war on copyright”), Americans for Prosperity (the anti-union group funded by the Koch Brothers that’s been active in Wisconsin in recent weeks) and VISA and Mastercard (for the company shutting out Wikileaks), among others.
Celebrate People’s History, an ongoing poster exhibit at Toronto Free Gallery, comes to a close this Saturday, March 19th. Join us as the posters come down for a chance to purchase the works, as well as the hardcover book that documents the full collection.
Proceeds from the sale will benefit Dara Greenwald, an artist and activist living in Brooklyn and recovering from cancer. Dara is the partner of Josh MacPhee, who has coordinated the Celebrate People’s History project.
The sale starts at noon, and posters will be sold on a first come, first served basis. Posters can be reserved at the gallery prior to the event.
Over ninety artists contributed to the Celebrate People’s History series, creating more than a hundred original pieces to honor the hidden histories of social movements. The collection is the culmination of 12 years of work by Josh MacPhee of the US-based radical print collective Just Seeds.
As hundreds of thousands gather in Wisconsin today, the protesters will carry posters, placards, and other ephemera that both borrows from and expands upon labor’s graphic lexicon. Photographers, video artists, print makers, and a host of others who don’t lay claim to an arts-focused identity have created a culture in Madison in recent weeks that has inspired Americans to talk again about class war, to discuss the idea of a general strike, and recognize the value of labor.
WI Rise Up by Nicholas Lampert of Just Seeds
Efforts to catalog artists’ and non-artists’ contributions are being made, assisted by how the images have spread via the internet. Nicholas Lampert and Colin Mathis of Just Seeds, have been churning out work since the protests began, and Brandon Bauer has cataloged their work, and the blog maintained by artists involved with Just Seeds has a growing collection as well.
Download the Occupied For Labor image by Colin Matthes (PDF)
Alongside these new contributions are more familiar symbols, like the now ubiquitous raised fist in the shape of Wisconsin, produced in solidarity by the website Rock Netroots. The image is so widespread on the internet now that its clarity has been degraded by the data lost by users constantly saving and re-saving the image in the JPEG format.
Solidarity by Rock Netroots
These images entered a canon almost instantaneously, as museum curators took to documenting and preserving the work. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History sent Barbara Klark Smith, a curator with the museum’s Political History division, to Madison, and Sarah Stolte, an Art History Ph.D. candidate at the UW and intern at Project Lodge set up an impromptu gallery exhibit of work produced by the protesters called SolidARTity.
SolidARTity, curated by Sarah Stolte, by appointment at Project Lodge
Although the bill that was the focus of the protests has been passed and signed into law, efforts to undo the damage are underway. Talk of a general strike has been assisted by Erik Drooker, who was asked by IWW Madison to contribute an image that could grow international solidarity. Drooker’s response appears below, with links to the Spanish and Arabic translations.
Download Drooker’s General Strike in English, Spanish, or Arabic
As well, Josh MacPhee has designed a pennant – partly inspired by Drooker’s work – about which he explains:
I had been working on this pennant as a utopian call, a hope and desire that Wisconsin would develop from a militant struggle that is awesome and inspiring, but also shockingly reformist, to one with some real teeth and drive towards self-governance. Now it seems that it may be more practical than I thought!
Download MacPhee’s pennant in either its 11″x17″ version, or the 8.5″x11″ size.
This post gathers some of the more high-profile graphics from Wisconsin’s uprising, and is by no means complete. Please help us grow this archive!
Liberate Tate, seen previously on Groundswell for their work protesting BP’s sponsorship of cultural institutions, has issued a call for proposals for a sound artwork to act as an alternative audio tour/guide for the Tate.
We want to install a new acoustic territory inside the Tate, to create a sound artwork that can occupy the Tate space yet exist within a much broader conceptual landscape. The final artwork will be available online for visitors to download onto MP3 players in advance of their visit to the Tate. ‘Alternative Tate’ will be exhibited in late June 2011. The deadline for submissions is April 11th 2011.
Anyone interested should see here for more information on the Alternative Tate Audio Tour.
UPDATE: Two hours after posting this update to the Free Voina English Twitter feed, their site has gone dark. The outage seems to have been an unrelated incident, as the site is back online.
Free Voina is reporting this morning that Leonid Nikolayev and Oleg Vorotnikov, both recently released from jail, and a third Voina member, Natalya Sokol, were attacked by plainclothes members of the anti-extremism police in St. Petersberg yesterday.
The attack follows a press conference held by Vorotnikov and Nikolayev earlier in the day, wherein they discussed the conditions of their detention.
Voina’s November 15th action St. Petersberg, involving the artists overturning a police car as part of an anti-corruption protest, was the precursor to their arrest. Images by Voina, arrangement by Hyperallergic.
Minor injuries are reported, and a flash memory stick the artists were carrying was confiscated. Oleg Vorotnikov describes the attack:
When we left the press conference in the Ligovsky prospect, we noticed that we were followed by a group of typical thugs. We observed that those were clearly anti-extremism officers… One police officer attacked Lenya from behind. They waved their IDs but we couldn’t examine them. They pushed baby pram away and hit Kasper against his face causing a bruise on his left chick. Two others knocked Kozlyenok down into the paddle and started kicking her. They injured her hand very seriously. I managed to free myself from the officers who were holding me and covered Kozlyenok with my body. The blows rained against my back and head. Kozlyenok’s face was already bashed. What’s more when they dragged her by hair, they pulled out one of her braids. The officers were trying to take away a camera from her. But she held it tightly. Activist Lyubka seized one of the officers and he bit her hand…
More details to come…
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