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Crisis From Internal Split in News & Letters Committees

Statement from the Marxist-Humanist Tendency of News and Letters Committees - March, 2008

Dear Friends,

We are writing to alert all readers and friends of a serious crisis afflicting News and Letters Committees (N&LC)—a crisis that places its very existence in jeopardy.

HAMBURG´S SUBVISION IS TRYING TO COOPT INTERNATIONAL "OFF" ART PROJECTS

A generously state-funded project with leading Hamburg art-institution figures at its helm is planning to showcase international "off" art - "new forms" of artistic activity that have developed at "far remove from the big art-fairs“ - in Summer 2008. Great news? Have you, or acquaintances, already been invited?

Just one minute, please.

Under

http://www.wirsindwoanders.de/files/demo.php

Iraqi-born "Virtual Jihadi" Artist's Show Shut Down in Troy, NY

An Iraqi born artist, now US citizen, Wafaa Bilal's work was shut down at the West Hall Art Department Gallery and will now be reopened tomorrow (March 11), but conservative public pressure threatens to close it once again.

'The New Spirit of Capitalism, Value and the End of Critique'

An ephemera workshop (www.ephemeraweb.org), 29-30 May 2008 Co-organised by the School of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex, and the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School.

Call for contributions and participation

[Originally posted by Marc Garret on Thu, 21 Feb 2008 on NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity]

Distant: http://www.furtherfield.org/mgarrett/distant/

Statement about why I am Making Net Art Once More:

I have been going through some changes regarding what type of personal, individual artwork that I wish to explore these days. Even though I am involved in various high-tech projects which are mainly collaborations, that are related to larger projects. I wish to return to making Net Art, reconnect to what has always been my favourite form of creativity and

The Department of Politics, International Relations & European Studies at Loughborough University (GB) invites applications for a fully-funded Faculty Studentship to undertake doctoral research from October 2008 in any area related to the Department's research interests.

Dr Ruth Kinna and Dr Dave Berry would like to hear from anyone interested in studying for a PhD in any area related to anarchist history, politics or theory.

Ruth Kinna is a Senior Lecturer in Politics. She has published notably on William Morris and Peter Kropotkin, and is the author of 'Anarchism: A

By LAURENT LEMEL, Associated Press Writer Mon Feb 18, 5:15 PM ET

PARIS - Alain Robbe-Grillet, an avant-garde author who dispensed with conventional storytelling as a pioneer of the postwar "new novel" movement in France, died Monday. He was 85.

Robbe-Grillet died at Caen University Hospital in western France, where he had been admitted over the weekend for cardiac problems, hospital officials said.

Multitudes-Icônes Launched

Multitudes is pleased to announce the inauguration of its new website, Multitudes-Icônes, which is dedicated to contemporary art

Multitudes-Icônes was launched during a workshop organized by Multitudes at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany (Documenta Halle, June 25-28, 2007). The site brings together three parallel projects: Multitude’s counter-project in response to the invitation to participate in Documenta 12; an artist residence project in which artists have been invited to engage with the site in order to produce a specific project; and, finally, archives of texts and Icônes portfolios (projects about and by artists) published in the journal since its inception in March 2000.

Multitudes was asked by the Documenta 12 organizers to respond to the exhibition’s three questions/themes (“Is modernity our antiquity?“; “What is Bare Life?“; and “What is to be done?“). The journal’s answer was to create a counter-project on Multitudes-Icônes called Critical and Clinical Documentation. On the site, the three questions were reformulated (that is, appropriated and détourned) and addressed to artists in a provocative way. Artists were asked to situate their work in relation to Documenta 12’s themes but also in relation to their participation or non-participation in the exhibition. The ensemble of responses—visual, verbal, sonorous—constitute alternative, multiple, and ironic points of view, or “critical and clinical” perspectives, regarding the exhibition’s themes and Documenta itself. The website’s organization of the artists’ responses provides an open framework, allowing users to articulate relations between replies, creating hybrid interventions, and transforming each user into a curator-artist of another, virtual-real Documenta.

"Gypsy Caravan"

Louis Proyect, Unrepentant Marxist


Scheduled for theatrical release in June (NYC, the 15th; Los Angeles the 29th), “Gypsy Caravan: When the Road Bends” is a film that is very much in the mold of “Buena Vista Social Club” and just as likeable. It also evokes the 1993 “Latcho Drom” (”safe journey”), another great film about Roma music.


It documents a six-week tour in 2001 by some of the greatest Roma musicians in the world, who are seen performing, socializing with each other in hotels and on the bus, and participating in village life back home. It is directed by Jasmine Dellal, who directed “American Gypsy: a Stranger in Everybody’s Land” for PBS in 2001, and filmed by Albert Maysles, the legendary director of “Gimme Shelter,” a record of a Rolling Stones tour, and other works.


The tour was organized by the World Music Institute (WMI), a New York-based nonprofit whose concerts I have reviewed in the past and who I have contributed money to. Given New York’s relentless drive toward high-rise yuppie hell, the WMI is one of the remaining cultural artifacts that make life livable here. Furthermore, the culture of the Roma people is about as at odds with the profit-driven world of real estate and banking as can be imagined. Besides their cultural legacy of some of the world’s greatest music, these unfairly maligned peoples can teach us about how to live better lives. Macedonian Esma Rezepova, one of the tour’s starring performers, put it this way: “The Roma have never made war or invaded another country.”

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