Variant, issue 43, Spring 2012
...the free, independent, arts magazine. In-depth coverage
in the context of broader social, political & cultural issues.
Complete issue:
Front Cover : Illustration from 'The Housing Monster', available at:
www.prole.info
The Filth, and the Fury
Kat Gollock
A look to radical 1970s collective activities in the form of the Photography Workshop and community arts networks and what they might tell us about achieving a class-based history as part of oppositional engagement today.
Comic & Zine Reviews
Mark Pawson
December's delayed round-up includes a look at a look at zines: Teal Triggs' 'Fanzines', Toby Mott's '100 Fanzines/10 Years Of British Punk: 1976–1985', Gestalten's 'Behind the Zines: Self-Publishing Culture'; and a look at book and food maps: 'The London Bookshop Map: 87 Independent Bookshops', 'Booksellers In Shoreditch & Hackney', 'You Are Hungry – An Edible Map of South Hackney & Environs', 'The Edinburgh Charity Shop And Reuse Map'.
Towards a New Documentalism
Jorge Ribalta
- reviews 'The Civil Contract of Photography', by Ariella Azoulay and 'The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning', by John Tagg:
"Documentary is everywhere today, since it is structurally linked to democratic discourse and to the ideological conditions of the liberal public sphere in which we live, as Tagg himself has worked to illuminate. That said, we also need to recognise that documentary practices will continue to exist as long as liberal democracy does. What do we do with that? We can look for a possible and productive answer to that question in Ariella Azoulay's 'The Civil Contract of Photography'."
If.... On Martial Values and Britishness
Emma Louise Briant
Consecutive Westminster governments have emphasised vigilance to threats', creating scapegoats to distract from domestic and foreign policy and drum up support. Amidst a state-of-emergency London Olympics bristling with securitisation and 'exceptional' democratic foreclosure, the inequity of royal pageant under public austerity draped in imperial re-imaginings, and public school assertions of class power presented as a return to old-fashioned discipline for civil society, Briant assesses this populist construction of 'British' militarism and 'martial values'.
"Organise your mourning"
Tom Coles
Setting out to assess Springtime, The Occupation Cookbook, Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible - publications produced as responses to a series of struggles since 2008, making use of assemblages of materials to try and simultaneously document, promote and develop new forms of resistance - Coles contrasts these with more recent texts belonging to an emerging, evolving critique, self-consciously outlining the underlying situation and political topography on which a coming intervention might act, of use to understanding the blasted landscape left by the receding froth of the earlier wave of publications.
Ethics and the political efficacy of citation in the work of Santiago Sierra
Ellen Feiss
Drawing on Derrida and looking to Judith Butler's incarnation of 'iterability' in order to establish a new framework for understanding the consequences of Santiago Sierra's work, Feiss seeks to reconsider the question of citation and political potency: is it possible to use the language of power in critique? How does one assess the political potential of a cultural strategy of resistance that utilises the hegemonic structures it seeks to dismantle?
The Poverty of Imagination
Tom Jennings
Accepting that current predicaments set-in during Thatcher's yesteryears, not yesterday's recession, this essay subjectively surveys two decades of austere growth in British poverty porn. Dissecting grim-up-north platitudes, perilous-down-south perambulations and sundry slumming-it social-realist serenades, an attempt is made to see if the national film oeuvre ought to have opened any eyes.
"Our country's calling card"
Culture as the Brand in Recessionary Ireland
Rosemary Meade
Mainstream media discussions of economic crisis display a moralising sensibility. Narratives of blame either so universalising they fail to interrogate issues of power, social reproduction, inequality and exclusion in the Irish context; or so narrowly targeted on charismatic miscreants they avoid analysis of the structural roots of this latest crisis in capitalism. In 'Brand Ireland' discourses, the uncertain status of Ireland's reputation and the urgency of 'brand' consolidation manifest a consensus that culture be 'functionalised' in the interests of economic revival...
Generation Bailout
Art, Psycho-Geography, and 'The Irish Mind' debate
Joanne Laws
- examines the visual arts in Ireland at this post-bust juncture: An emerging 'political turn', visible across recent festival formats, is an institutional framing of an 'emergence' from crisis, supported by discourse on political exhibition making - notably, in cultivating a new fidelity to the 'local', contemporary Irish art is re-inhabiting familiar terrain; that of 'land', 'place' and the "native sensibilities of the local genius". Laws concludes examining a revival of the 'Irish mind debate', querying whether there is a specifically Irish intellectual tradition counter to a 'hegemonic rationalism' of 'Anglo-Saxon/Ango-American logic' which might enable "a reinvestment in the notion of what it means to be a republic".
The Housing Monster
Friendofzanetti
prole.info's 'The Housing Monster' sets out to de-fetishise housing as a commodity form by means of an illustrated book. That we have waited so long for such a clear and compelling introduction to this subject says much about the aporias of the productivist Left which has traditionally relegated reproductive issues, including housing, behind workplace issues. The book's arrival provides an opportunity to discuss housing in a way that does not merely replicate the dull compulsions of social democracy, which assumes that distribution always follows behind production, and thereby implicitly accepts the capitalist relation in the wage-labour form. The book is notable for its attention to the individual forms of stress and estrangement that the vast majority of us experience on the capital-deficit side of property relations. This book is an attempt to lift the cap from over our eyes again – the monsters must be slain!
Back Cover : Occupy Poster by kennardphillipps, distributed with The Occupied Times
[Occupy Everything, new work by kennardphillipps, is at Hales Gallery, London, 19 April-26 May 2012]
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