Cultural Hijack: Rethinking Intervention

Wish we could attend this CONTRAvention in London this week:  (from their website)

Cultural Hijack, London

Exhibition – Live-programme – CONTRAvention

Image Archive – Reading Room

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Rethinking Intervention

Cultural Hijack presents a survey of provocative interventions which have inserted themselves into the world, demanding our attention, interrupting everyday life, hijacking, trespassing, agitating and teasing. Often unannounced and usually anonymous, these works have appropriated media channels, hacked into live TV and radio broadcasts, detourned billboards, re-appropriated street furniture, subverted signs, monuments and civic architectures, exposed corporations and tax loopholes, and revealed the absurdities of bureaucratic behaviours.

Zevs (FR), Ztohoven (CZ), Krzysztof Wodiczko (PL), Matthias Wermke & Mischa Leinkauf (DE), Voina (RU), Upper Space (UK), Gregory Sholette (US), Michael Rakowitz (US), Platform (UK), Ben Parry (UK) & Peter McCaughey (IE), Tatzu Nishi (JP), Renzo Martens (NL), Knit the City (UK), Peter Kennard (UK), Laura Keeble (UK), Allan Kaprow (US), John Jordan (UK), Tushar Joag (IN), International Peripatetic Sculptors Society (UK+), Space Hijackers (UK), Paul Harfleet (UK), EPOS 257 (CZ), Electronic Disturbance Theater (US), Nina Edge (UK), Alan Dunn (UK), Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (UK+), Paolo Cirio (IT), Leah Borromeo & Dr. D (UK), BGL (CA) 

The exhibition positions itself at the intersection between art, politics and social justice in an historical moment, as we witness a rising tide of global resistance to neoliberal capitalism through an expanding ‘movement of movements’, from Zapatismo to the Arab Spring, from alternative G8 summits to Occupy Wall Street. In the shadows of this moment, artists are joining in the writing of alternative histories, the reclamation of our rights to the city and the unfinished project of the revolution of everyday life.

In attempting to house these ideas together in an institution, we are mindful of the Architectural Association as an influential zone, where the physical future of Architecture and Urbanism is significantly shaped. We propose that the dissemination of the ideas and practices gathered for Cultural Hijack, might similarly shape the possibilities for us to occupy as yet unimagined futures, where user-generated cities and systems, that support individual and collective empowerment, become more prevalent.

Do small acts of resistance and creative disruption, build muscle that encourages an appetite for real alternatives to neoliberal capitalism or do they end point and sate such an appetite? And what of ‘commissioned resistance’, is it implicitly flawed, sponsored by the system it seeks to critique, or can it, despite its origins, have impact?

These questions & more, as well as yours, will be picked over in the CONTRAvention: 24^th - 26^th April 2013.

Tortilla Subversion at Asian Art Museum

Eat, Pray, Take:  Tortilla screen-printed with Hoisin Sauce at the Asian Art Museum’s Matcha event last Thursday.  Click to enlarge.  (Photo: Terrance Graven)

A week ago (7/26/12), one of our founding members served as special guest artist of The Great Tortilla Conspiracy, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s monthly Thursday evening Matcha event.

This month’s Matcha was the culmination of a year-long “unofficial residency” project at the museum by artist Imin Yeh called SpaceBi.  For this event, Yeh invited more than two dozen APA and local artists to participate, which is unprecedented in that it is close to two dozen more than are typically invited by the museum. (Action-packed event Program here)

The Great Tortilla Conspiracy was among those invited, and the Conspiracy in turn invited me as their special guest.  Museum management was reportedly “thrilled” to learn of my participation.

UC Student Art Action protests corporate privatization of public education

Art intervention at Bancroft and Telegraph, one of the main entrances to the UC Berkeley campus

(UPDATED 6/22/12:  1) Center for Artistic Activism’s Actipedia site; 2) Radio Interview)

On Tuesday, May 8, in the midst of final exam week, a group of female students performed a public art action at UC Berkeley to call attention to the UC Regents’ privatization of what was once the premier public university in the country.

Tate à Tate interventionist audio tour of Tate museums

Platform, Liberate Tate and Art Not Oil present a site-specific sound artwork themed around the issue of BP sponsorship of Tate.

Tate á Tate is created by Ansuman Biswas (Tate Britain), Isa Suarez, Mae Martin and Mark McGowan (Tate Boat) and Phil England and Jim Welton (Tate Modern).

Tate à Tate website

Download the three-part audio tour and go to Tate Britain, Tate Boat and Tate Modern to participate in this interventionist sound artwork – or listen at home.

The site includes a How-To Guide and Workshops and Actions as well as an Introduction to oil sponsorship of the arts, with a link to the open publication Culture Beyond Oil.

FAQs

Occupiers set up living room in Bank of America lobby

[Embedded video]

Uploaded by OccupyTVNY on Mar 12, 2012

A crew of occupiers makes a home of a Bank of America lobby with a couch, a coffee table, a rug and a potted plant. “Bank of America took our homes so we though we’d move in here!” Join them March 15 as America turns the tables on the nation’s largest bank!

facebook.com/fightbankofamerica

fthebanks.org/

“When art is just a luxury, ‘ART’ is a LIE” Banner Drop at NY MoMA

#J13 #OCCUPYMUSEUMS #OCCUPYWALLSTREET – MoMA BANNER DROP @ DIEGO RIVERA EXHIBIT

MoMA is exhibiting work from one of the most renowned Mexican painters of the twentieth century, Diego Rivera. Diego influenced by the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution, believed that art should play a role in empowering working people to understand their own histories. Meanwhile MoMA buys and sells millions of dollars in art at Sotheby’s auction house. Sotheby’s has locked out 43 Local 814 union art handlers, claiming they are unable to negotiate a new contract with them. “The auctioneer proposed cutting the handlers’ workweek to 36 1/4 hours from 38 3/4 hours and increasing the number of temporary laborers, according to both sides. The union said new work rules would decrease eligibility for overtime, resulting in take-home pay declining 5 percent to 15 percent. Temporary workers without medical or pension benefits would replace unionized art handlers as they retire or find other jobs. Chief Executive Officer William Ruprecht, yearly salary doubled in 2010 to $6 million dollars.”

http://www.sothebysbadforart.com/content/

Photos: 2012-01-13 – New York – #OCCUPYWALLSTREET MoMA Action

The tide is rising . . .

“Should Museums Welcome Parody?”

That’s a question posed by scholar Morgan Pitelka in a review of the book Lords of the Samurai: The Legacy of a Daimyo Family published in the journal Early Modern Japan in 2011.

The book itself was published by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and accompanied the same Lords of the Samurai exhibit which inspired our critical intervention.

The review explicates cultural politics otherwise elided, duly noting the issues raised in the rich dialogue generated by the intervention.

As long as museum exhibitions and catalogs are not subject to the same processes of peer review and academic criticism as other forms of scholarship, they should be open to—and indeed welcome—informal and if needed anonymous critiques of the sort orchestrated by Majime Sugiru and his band of merry artist-activists. Because in the end, the complicated and at times heated conversation about history, identity, and representation that can be traced through the websites, interventions, blogs, and even radio shows related to the Lords of the Samurai exhibition adds up to one of the more significant and compelling English-language critiques—albeit in the form of online hypertext—of the politics of museum displays of Japanese culture.

A pdf of the entire review is available here.

New intervention by Liberate Tate: “Floe Piece”

[We blogged about Liberate Tate previously here.  For their complete works, visit their blog/site.]

Press release January 15, 2012

Liberate Tate stage Arctic ice performance in Tate Turbine Hall

‘Floe-piece’ highlights Tate’s sanctioning of BP’s risky Arctic drilling

On Saturday evening (14 January 2012) art collective Liberate Tate carried out their latest unofficial performance in Tate Modern highlighting Tate’s complicity in BP’s controversial oil extraction practices around the world.

At 6.30pm at the Occupy London protest camp at St Paul’s Cathedral four veiled figures dressed in black lifted the 55 kg chunk of Arctic ice onto a sledge and walked it in procession across the Thames on the Millennium Bridge and into the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. They placed the ice at the bottom of the Turbine Hall, standing silently around the melting ice for 15 minutes before leaving the building.

The Arctic ice had been donated to the Occupy London protest by an Arctic researcher who had brought it back to the UK.

Every BofA ATM in SF turned into “Truth Machine”

Via Rainforest Action Network’s Understory:

RAN activists took to the streets of San Francisco last night and turned every Bank of America ATM in the city into an Automated Truth Machine.

Using special non-adhesive stickers that were designed to look exactly like BoA's ATM interface, the activists gave the bank's customers a menu of what their money is being used for, including investment in coal-fired power plants, foreclosure on America's homes, bankrolling climate change, and paying out fat executive bonuses. (Photo: Rainforest Action Network)

The stickers also encourage BoA customers to “Stop doing business with Bank of America until they start behaving responsibly” and have the URL to our new blog, which we’ve just launched along with The New Bottom Line:

BankruptingAmerica.tumblr.com

Read the full story and check out the interactive map of all 85 atm locations, including photos of every converted Truth Machine.

This is a framing action for the upcoming Occupy Wall St. West daylong mass occupation of the Financial District on #J20.  There will also be an OccupySF “Run on the Banks” in the Mission tomorrow (Sat. 1/14) at noon, Mission @ 16th St.

 

Video: Occupy Telephone flash mob at Wells Fargo SF

SF Pride At Work » Flash Mob at Wells Fargo: Occupy Telephone Video!

Singing, “Stop calling, stop calling, can’t afford to pay anymore,” a flash mob danced on the counters and in the lobby of the San Francisco Wells Fargo branch on Montgomery and Market on January 7th to protest Wells Fargo’s role in the economic and housing crisis.  The event, organized by San Francisco Pride at Work/HAVOQ and the San Francisco Occupy movement highlighted the unfairness of the company’s profits and bailouts after it made fraudulent housing loans that triggered the 2008 economic meltdown.

Participants spoke out about how Wells Fargo profits from student loan debts, which are considered to be among the most lucrative loans banks can make. ‘”Wells Fargo makes immense profits off of student loans and pays essentially nothing in taxes,” said Ethan Knudson, a recent graduate with student loans from Wells Fargo. “All while recent grads like me are unemployed or stuck in dead-end jobs.” Wells Fargo is estimated to hold over 10 billion dollars in private student debt. . .

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