Kartinka via der_atheist

Днес, 10 юни, руският художник Артем Лоскутов беше освободен. Становището на съдията е, че положителните му личностни характеристики не са били взети под внимание, и задържането му е било незаконно. Въпреки освобождението си, Лоскутов е подсъден за притежаване на наркотици (11 гр марихуана) , за което може да получи до 3 години затвор.

Неговата обществена дейност, като организатор на ежегодната „Монстрация“ не е политическа, с изключение на пикета, организиран от него 2006 по повод на 3 годишнината от арестуването на бившия президент на ЮКОС Михаил Ходорковский.

Това звучи като успех, но какво да кажем за другите дела, повечето все още висящи, в които руски художници са обвинени в провокиране на религиозна и междунационална ненавист, обществен екстремизъм и обида на управляващи?

„Монстрация“ няма политически оттенък. Независимо че в сайта на „Что делать?“  лозунгите на „монстриращите“ са наречени „ситуационистки“ те са лишени от политическия левичарски патос на 68ма в Париж и са по-скоро абсурдни. "Как нибудь так!", "Где я?", "О, повелитель, где твой выключатель?", "Защитим опарышей" не могат да се сравнаят с „Down with the state. Abolish class society. In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices. Masochism today takes the form of reformism. The revolution is incredible because it’s really happening.“

В нито едно от другите дела не е повдигнато обвинение за притежание на наркотици. Артистичните действия на другите обвиняеми са достатъчно политически и не-игрови, за да могат да бъдат лесно обявени за противни на държавата и упрвлението й, особено ако тази държава не се слави с особена демократичност, не гарантира свобода на словото и изразяването, не търпи критика, журналисти са стреляни наляво и надясно, гей парад забранен, опозицията потъпквана, на протестни шествия има повече полиция отколкото участници...
 

Може би а-политичността на Монстрацията направи случаят Лоскутов толкова известен. Въпреки че всички художници са получили и получават по-голяма или по-малка поддръжка (толкова по-малка колкото по-осъзнато политически те са), за нито един от тях нямаше толкова светкавична, масова и добре организирана поддръжка. Поколенчески разлики? Разитие на интернет стратегии за работа в мрежи? Блогова култура? Може би руското общество е успяло да направи демократичната си гражданска активност видима?

Да, може би. Но Дмитрий Пименов, който хвърли питарда в Горбачов преди няколко месеца не беше поддържан от никого. Андрей Ерофеев и Юрий Самодуров (вече осъден и за изложбата „Осторожно, религия!“), които иначе получават солидна поддръжка преди всичко на московското интелектуално общество и съдени в момента, не получиха такъв взрив от интернет публикации по целия свят. Аня Алчук (макар и оправдана за „Осторожно, религия!“) беше намерена удавена в берлинските канали миналата година , и този факт (дори и да е действително самоубийство, на основата на депресия след преживяването на съда), както и делото срещу нея едва едва се промъкнаха като информация в някои елитни академични и артистични кръгове, преди всичко заради нейните и на Михаил Риклин (нейния съпруг) международни връзки

А какво да кажем за живеещите повече от 10 години в изгнание Авдей Тер-Оганян и Олег Мавроматти , които като че ли вече макар и упоменавани, все пак позабравени руската общественост не са забравени от тези които ги съдят. 

Лесно е да се защити а-политичното изкуство. Лесно е художникът да бъде просто „фрик“. Но свободта на словото и на изразяването не е в това да излезеш с балон на улицата, когато няма парад на детето. Затова струва ми се, делото „Лоскутов“ е по-сложно отколкото изглежда на пръв поглед. Ако наркотиците са подхвърлени, то тогава той е съден като възможен бъдещ лидер, или като отказал се да сътрудничи на полицията . Може би пикета, посветен на Ходорковски е причината? Но защо три години след това се случва съда?

А може би просто новосибирската полиция се е ядосала на това пишлеме, което се прави на важно, и иска призовка на хартия, и просто иска да му сложи вилицата на врата...

Ако а-политичното изкуство спечели битката за „свобода на словото и изразяването“ няма ли това да стане причина за задълбочаване на обвиненията към политическото изкуство?

Ето – има свобода на словото (особено когато не казваш нищо), Лоскутов беше оправдан, в Русия има демокрация...

Искрено се надявам Лоскутов да бъде оправдан, но ми се струва по-важно този случай да бъде разгледан в контекста на цялата ситуация в Русия, политическото изкуство и ангажираността със социални и политически проблеми, която не остава небезнаказана. Формирането на ниша на „ангажирано“ изкуство, контролирано от властта (била тя държавна или корпоративна) не е признак на демокрация. А режимът в Русия придоби вече достатъчно опит в симулативните стратегии на западните „демокрации“ и с модерннистката си напористост даже може да се окаже по-мащабен и изобретателен от тях.

http://www.livescience.com/animals/090430-fish-feel-pain-too.html

Този анонс за дебат в Червената къща, отнасящ се за солидарността между трудешите се ми напомня за разговорите, които имахме около
празнуването на 8-ми март в openlyfeminist.com, както и за този текст.
 

 


Център за култура и дебат „Червената къща” Ви кани на 7 май (четвъртък) от 19.00 ч. в Червена зала на дебат на тема:

"Да живей, живей труда!". А солидарността между трудещите се..в епохата на "изчезването на работника"?

Социалистическа България бележеше празника на труда Първи май със зрелищни официални манифестации. Днес БСП превърна този ден в партиен празник. 20 години след падането на комунистическия режим Първи май отбелязват не като празник, а като повод за протест, /"Първи май не е празник, а ден за борба!"/ малцина ляво-мислещи младежи. Изчезнала ли е сoлидарността между трудещите се, е един от въпросите, които искаме да поставим с това публично обсъждане. Неотдавнашната атака в Атина срещу българската профсъюзна активистка Костадинка Кунева предизвика мощна вълна на солидарност в Гърция, но не развълнува българското общество, нито официалните профсъюзи у нас...
Дни след поредния Първи май искаме да се запитаме: какви са условията за работа в България днес? Какво се случва с работническата солидарност във времена на криза и закриване на производства? Как разбират и как отстояват интересите на работещите синдикатите у нас?
С участието на представители на национално представените синдикати, студентско-ученическо движение „Призив”, ляво-радикалната организация „23 септември” и анализаторите Ивайло Дичев (културолог, Софийски университет "Св. Климент Охридски"), Илия Илиев (антрополог, Софийски университет "Св. Климент Охридски") и Иван Еленков (историк, Софийски университет "Св. Климент Охридски").
Дебатът е съпътстван от прожекция на видеоматериали от протестни демонстрации в България и Гърция.
С подкрепата на Фондация „Америка за България”.

Вход: 2/1 лв.

Входът за журналисти е свободен, но ви молим да представяте журналистическите си карти.
При предварително заявен от Вас интерес, бихме могли да ви предоставим още информация.
За повече информация: Ирина Недева, Стефан Кръстев, 988 81 88, www.redhouse-sofia.org

Заповядайте!
 

Очень надеюсь, что идея скопировать знаменитые перформансы потерпит крах - настоящий перформанс неповторим

Дальше ›

По време на леко хаотичните протести през януари, написах този постинг относно обединяващите цели, които трябва да се
издигат, а не разнопосочно стреляне от различни групи, които не могат да определят зашо са излезли заедно на площата

Обединяващ в този случай според мене беше възможният протест против изменението на закона за митингите и събранията, който сега се опитават пак да наложат.

Жалко че няма да съм в Бг, но ми се струва че утрешният протест против изменението на закона за митингите и събранията е обединяващ независимо от  политическите или социални разлики на възможните протестираши.

Дано да е успешен , стискам палци!

http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?oid=82859488199&view=all#/event.php?eid=82859488199

Граждани на Република България,

след като се опитаха да ни следят Интернет и телефоните, сега управляващата коалиция БСП-ДПС предприемат следваща стъпка в посока връщане на България към ТОТАЛИТАРИЗМА.

Следващата седмица предстои гласуване на поправки в Закона за събранията и митингите, които ще забранят на всички нас да участваме в митинги и протести в близост до парламента, президентството, министерски съвет, МВР, всички съдебни палати в България, мостове, републикански пътища ...

Това е грубо погазване на демокрацията, което не се е случвало в нито една друга европейска държава.

Българи, призоваваме ви да отделите 1 час от времето си и да дойдете на протеста следващата сряда - 29.04 пред парламента.

Може би последния протест на жълтите павета...

Може да включите себе си и да приканите своите приятели в битката за българската демокрация:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=8 ... 199&ref=nf

Ако тези промени бъдат приети, горко ни и да живее БКП!

http://dnes.dir.bg/2009/04/23/news4344629.html
http://bulgaria.actualno.com/news_235346.html

Вече много години след като изтърся някоя "зла" дума за образованието, което получаваме в Художествената академия (а смея
да твърдя тези думи са валидни и за другите ВУЗове) все някой ще изскочи да каже , че не "уважавам" старите или някаква друга глупост.
ПО-долу една статия, която критикува американското пбразование и представя нов модел за неговото развитие.

За съжаление българското образование е вече много далеч дори и от критикуваното американско (европейските университети
също има какво да направят по въпроса), но за да не трябва да се минава през всички стадии на развитие, мисля, че е най-добре
да се скочи в бъдещето и да се заложи на интердисциплинарно образование (толкова мечтаех за такова докато бях в Академията)
и професорите да подписват договор за не повече от 7 години, за да се поддържа тяхната амбиция да са изявени професионалисти
а не мухлясяли професори, които преподават едно и също от година на година, карат студентите
да слушат ненужни лекции, които са далеч от всякаква практика.


The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

April 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Field Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.”
 

Luckily for us, the Australian performance artist known as Stelarc, formerly Stelios Arcadiou, is not prone to sensationalism.

Stelarc’s video is one the more grisly highlights of “Corpus Extremus (LIFE+),” an exhibit about the wonders and horrors of “PostNatural History,” and the ways in which technology is blurring the traditional notions of life, death and identity.

In the gallery of postnatural history, for example, is a goat that has been genetically tinkered with to produce spider silk, useful for fishing line and bulletproof vests, in its milk. Elsewhere you can look through a microscope and see a movie projected on living cells, watch a movie of Russian cosmonauts examining grains of kefir, a yogurtlike drink popular in Russia, to determine the grains’ potential worthiness as “cosmonauts,” or see a mock documentary about an S&M organic farm collective.

In the early days of the show you could walk through a forest of poles wired with antennas transmitting signals of your presence to a vat of neurons at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Signals back from the neurons would activate pen recorders to run up and down the poles and inscribe them with stripes.

“Silent Barrage,” as it is called, is dormant now, the connection to the neurons having been turned off. But if this gadget was alive while it was awake, could running around in it too much make it crazy and constitute abuse?

Nine years ago, when Exit Art presented an earlier show about genetics, the burning debate was about whether genes and life forms could be patented. Ownership of our genes might be at stake, but not our humanity or our identities as trees or people, dead or alive and machine or animate. I remember wandering around that show, “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution,” marveling at the dedication and the scientific acumen of the artists, who had done things like raise photosensitive grass and clone trees.

Now it’s all up for grabs, and paradise has gotten a lot darker.

“A foundational idea for this show was that we are permanently in a condition of creating, being excited or horrified by our inventions,” said Boryana Rossa, a Bulgarian-born artist and graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

She said it was all right if people were confused and left the gallery wondering whether what they had seen was art or science. The important thing was to start a conversation about what technology could do to us. The artists, she said, have hands-on experience with biology in programs like SymbioticA, a lab at the University of Western Australia where artists and biologists collaborate.

Artists are the antennas of society, but they are not the only ones thinking about these issues.

Some thinkers, including Freeman Dyson, the physicist and futurist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, have suggested that the “Darwinian interlude” of three billion years of evolution by means of mutations passing down through species is coming to an end. In its place would be a technologically enabled swapping of genes across species. Carl R. Woese, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has theorized that such horizontal gene transfer prevailed in the primordial soup before cells got locked in species. We will be fine with it, Dr. Dyson has said, when children start breeding miniature dinosaurs with rabbit ears and other exotic creatures for science fairs the way horticulturists turn out new breeds of tomatoes.

The body, however, has its ways of fighting back against the 5-year, or 500-year plans of its owners. Geneticists report that our own genes are still evolving, to what end, no one can guess. No supercomputer can yet predict from simply reading a sequence of A’s, C’s, T’s and G’s that make up a genetic code what creature will emerge.

The progression to postnatural history may be a painful birth if the experience of Stelarc, 62, who splits his time between Brunel University in West London and the University of Western Sydney in Australia, is any example. The body, he says, is obsolete and needs to map its “post-evolutionary strategies.”

To that end, Stelarc has outfitted himself at times with an extra hand (nonsurgically), swallowed a camera that would explore the sculpture of his stomach and hung himself in the air on hooks. For a show called “Fractal Flesh,” he wired half his body, in Luxembourg, up to muscle stimulation equipment that could be controlled by computers in Paris, Helsinki and Amsterdam. The result, he told an interviewer later, “was a split body experience.”

The ear on his arm, he said, is a work in progress that has required a couple of surgeries so far. It took him 12 years to find the doctors and the financing, which was provided by the Discovery Channel as part of a series in experimental surgery, to do the work.

The doctors, Stelarc said, were a little dubious that this was art. “They were overheard discussing, though, that perhaps they were really the artists and my body was just the canvas!” he said in an e-mail message.

The ear was originally slated for the outside of his left arm, but during the process of stretching the skin to provide space for the ear, a necrosis developed and the ear’s location had to move. In 2006, as shown in the gallery video, surgeons in Los Angeles installed a porous polyethylene ear-shaped prosthesis in his forearm and then snugged his skin down over it. At the same time, he says, they installed a tiny microphone, which picked up the doctor’s voices even through bandages and a face mask.

Unfortunately the microphone became seriously infected and had to be removed. “I could have lost an arm for an ear,” Stelarc said.

Stelarc’s own tissues and blood vessels have since grown into the prosthesis, anchoring it permanently. More surgeries are planned to improve its sculptural relief, including adding a bag of his own stem cells for an earlobe.

“The ear visualizes that idea that we can now engineer additional organs, Internet-enabled, to better function in the technological terrain that we now inhabit,” he said. “It is also an image of excess, of ambivalence and of the alternate.”

Once the microphone is reinstalled, Stelarc said, anything it “hears” will be wirelessly transmitted to the Web. Someone in Paris could log in and hear what Stelarc is up to in Australia — or presumably hear him snoring.

Stelarc says he understands that some people may be uneasy and squeamish about what he is doing. For his own part, he said, “You’re never in your comfort zone.” Such is the price of being a performance artist.

“Most of the projects and performances I’ve done have either been physically difficult or technically complicated to achieve,” he said. “Sometimes both, ha ha.”