Update: We’ve got copies of Issue 01 of Scapegoat Journal in our store.
The current economic crisis has turned attention toward volunteerism – as resources dry up, or are prevented from being distributed, companies turn would-be paid jobs into volunteer internships, and art/design firms increasingly offer their services to organizations trying valiantly to remedy the more dramatic symptoms of capitalism. These troubling and ambivalent dynamics are familiar to cultural producers, especially those whose work (like Groundswell’s) has been a labor of love.
Frank Chimero’s Design Won’t Save the World
Sacrificial labor is a seeming requirement of the cultural economy as currently configured. We’re required to work for free, or, as is sometimes worse, for ourselves, which requires all the more dedication, time, and labor, especially when workers collectively self-manage. Too often do radical democratic projects suffer from making this sacrifice. Can this kind of work be maintained, especially where it’s an act of solidarity?
(Jules Rochielle curates the Social Practices Art Network newsfeed, and shares works and artist opportunities with Groundswell.)
Invisible-5 (2006) investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor, in California’s San Fernando Valley, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audio documents. The project also traces natural, social, and economic histories along the route.
LANDSAT Image of the San Fernando Valley, facing north towards Pacoima, showing the perimeter of the North Hollywood (Area 1) groundwater contamination Superfund zone. North Hollywood is one of four areas of groundwater contamination within the San Fernando Valley Basin, and consists of two parts, the North Hollywood Operable Unit (OU) and the Burbank OU.
I-5 is an important pathway for residents, migrants, shippers, and more, as well as the nonhuman life that copes with its impact. The high speed artery connects Los Angeles with San Francisco, and is an Intermodal Corridor of Economic Significance, to use the state’s term, codified under California law as a vital resource for national and international trade. Given the high traffic along the route, and the industries that call it home, the lenght of I-5 is highly contaminated with pollutants.
Often, there is little to see, smell, or taste of the mostly invisible pollutants: benzene and perchlorate in the water, dioxin and PM2.5 in the air. For residents along the I-5 corridor, often these manifest as just a hazy sky, a faint odor, or the sense that something tastes different about the water. . . And the movement of traffic along the I-5 itself creates a river of moving air, where sprayed pesticides mix with diesel emissions, creating a moving stream dense with small particulate matter.
The work takes the form of four CDs, downloadable as MP3s, to guide the listener along the highway landscape as though they were on a museum audio tour. Mixing elements of critical tourism, sonic experiment, audio documentary, and investigative journalism, Invisible-5 is a collaboration between three artists and two organizations. The collaborators on Invisible-5 are artists Amy Balkin and Kim Stringfellow, audio lead Tim Halbur, and organizations Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, and Pond: Art, activism, and ideas.
Invisible-5 was included in the exhibition JUST SPACE(S) at LACE, Los Angeles in fall 2007, organized by Ava Bromberg and Nicholas Brown, and in Citizen Artists Making Emphatic Arguments at Casa de Tunel, Tijuana, in 2008.
Joe Bigley is touring Afghanistan, creating what may be the largest ever social sculpture. This Afghanistan is not the territory that comes to mind, that geopolitical entity bordering China, Pakistan, Iran, and the others, but only its outline, traced within the United States, with a 3,435.5 mile bicycle ride beginning and ending at Ground Zero.
Bigley’s undertaking, Travsersing a Foreign Border Domestically, began on May 12, 2011, and this date is significant for a number of reasons. Joseph Beuys was born on that day 90 years prior, Operation Enduring Freedom (America’s post-9/11 war on Afghanistan) will turn 10 soon after the project is completed, and ten days prior to its commencement, Osama bin Laden was assassinated in Pakistan. As he describes:
The timing of this project is crucial to its impact and execution. . . July, 2011 is the proposed time for the scale down to the troop surge that was announced in November 2009. The complexity and emotional resonance that this conflict has established in the world psyche and the anticipated media focus on the scale down can very well assist in a public willingness to share ideas regarding this topic.
Bigley hand built his bike trailer out of bamboo, steel and sheet aluminum
Similar to Jeremy Deller’s It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq (2009), T.F.B.D. makes no pretense to offer a solution to the conflict, preferring instead to make the focus public engagement, to have a conversation with participants along the way about the war and its effects. The artist claims a neutral stance, no doubt hoping not to skew the temperament of those who would engage with the project, but within this weighty context, and with the assistance of geographers, curators, and others, Bigley will engage in what he considers to be an act of solidarity, of temporary displacement and physical exertion that he admits is a voluntary, but nonetheless an empathetic gesture.
Via Jules Rochielle
Scapegoat Journal made its debut last week in Toronto with an inaugural issue on property [PDF], which we announced last year. Scapegoat explores the relationship between capitalism and the built environment, and from the first, the editors offer their criticism of professionalized architectural design, that architects are complicit in the valorization of capital.
The figure of the scapegoat carries the burden of the city and its sins. Walking in exile, the scapegoat was once freed from the constraints of civilization. Today, with no land left unmapped, and with processes of urbanization central to political economic struggles, Scapegoat is exiled within the reality of global capital.
The profession’s acceptance of capitalist property relations is compounded by its purposeful inaccessibility, its love affair with feigning autonomy and living in a theory-driven world of constant experimentation. “The aesthetic autonomy lauded by
designers and theorists,” Scapegoat writes, “is too often a conservative retreat into classist modes of distinction.” For the editors, the remedy is a move back into lived social relations, asserting that “the necessity of design cannot be reduced to logical, technical, or professional registers because it is properly, and relentlessly, an existential preoccupation.”
Joining them on this adventure are many friendly faces, some are likely familiar to longtime Groundswell readers. In order of appearance: Alexis Bhagat, Nato Thompson, Shiri Pasternak, Alan W. Moore, Adrian Blackwell, and Not An Alternative. The table of contents below lays out the full scope of the issue.
Copies of Scapegoat are available in limited print run (contact the editors via Scapegoat’s website) or the PDF can be downloaded for free.
Disclosure: Groundswell is friendly with the Scapegoat crew.
Students occupy Slade School of Art
Days after University College of London (UCL) students occupied the school’s Jeremy Bentham Room, art students at UCL’s Slade School staged a second occupation, extending the initial set of demands to include grievances specific to the arts and humanities departments. These are but two of the dozens of buildings occupied by students in the UK in opposition to tuition fee hikes and the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance.
The Carrotworkers Collective, Space Hijackers, and Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination have lent their support to the students, with three days of “alternative education, art, activism and disobedience” planned for this weekend. Already, students have created solidarity dance-offs between occupied campuses, choreographed evasive swarms, and there are more acts of creative disruption to come.
Subscribe via RSS
Facebook
Twitter