Posts Tagged ‘activism’
“If you must lie (and you must), lie honorably”*…
Long-time reaaders will know of your correspondent’s affection and regard for The Yes Men, the culture jamming activist duo Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (and their network of supporters). They’ve impersonated– lampooned in painfully telling ways– everyone from President George W. Bush and Dow Chemical to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the New York Post (above)… much of it chronicled in three wonderful films made about their work. They’ve also done their best to encourage and enable others. But now, they’re really giving it all away…
Two years ago, we Yes Men received a generous seed grant to “replicate,” i.e. help activist groups use our tricks. We spent the next two years absorbed in careful experiments that built on the twenty years before that.
Now — on the occasion of a retrospective showing of things that we’ve made, and in the hopes of fulfilling the grantor’s wish to see “hundreds” of Yes Men take wing — we’re inviting you to sign up for our Meddleverse…
Learn from the best– @theyesmen share their activist secrets in the Meddleverse.
• The Yes Men
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As we admire audacity, we might recall that on this date in 2006 that last Mobile army surgical hospital (MASH) unit was decommissioned by the United States Army… 23 years after the final episode of the TV series, M*A*S*H, that made those facilities famous (even as it critiqued war in general– and the Vietnam War, which was underway when the series premiered– in particular).
“Send me a postcard”*…
Ellsworth Kelly was a major figure in American modern art. A painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting and Color Field painting, he was a leading Minimalist. But as Hyperallergic reminds us, he also worked in– on, with– postcards…
From the late 1940s to 2005, Ellsworth Kelly produced some 400 photo-based works using ordinary, mass-market postcards as the substrate. Handfuls of these gems of the art of collage are tucked into various Kelly monographs and other books; Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards, at the Tang Museum through November 28, assembles 150 of them, and the accompanying catalogue includes dozens more. The spirit of playful improvisation is up front in these works, their range of figural and genre references experimental in spirit, their facture seemingly unlabored (sometimes downright scrappy). Delightful in themselves, they compel reconsideration of the late, great artist’s more austere, visually refined abstractions with an awareness of both his sense of humor and his sense of place…
An appreciation– and more wonderful examples– at “The Unexpected Humor of Ellsworth Kelly,” from Stephen Maine in @hyperallergic.
* Shocking Blue, “Send Me A Postcard“
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As we contemplate collage, we might send expressive birthday greetings to Benny Andrews; he was born on this date in 1930. An activist and educator, he is primarily remembered as an artist, especially for his expressive, figurative paintings that often incorporated collaged fabric and other material. A minimalist (like Kelly), Andrews was interested not in how much he could paint, but how little.
See more of his work here.
“To me, pictures are like blintzes – ya gotta get ‘em while they’re hot”*…
Sure. I’d like to live regular. Go home to a good looking wife, a hot dinner, and a husky kid. But I guess I got film in my blood. I love this racket. It’s exciting. It’s dangerous. It’s funny. It’s tough. It’s heartbreaking.
-Weegee
Weegee wanted his pictures to show some humanity. He walked back about a hundred feet. Set up his camera. Used flash powder and Kazam! There was the whole scene. The corpse. The blood. The cops. The balcony seat of people looking out to see what had just happened. Drama. Humanity. Crime.
Weegee came out of Złoczów now part of the Ukraine. He was born Arthur Fellig in June 1899. He emigrated with his family. They landed New York 1909. Lived in the Lower East Side. His father was a hatmaker and part-time rabbi. Weegee took whatever work came. He became a janitor. Got the nickname “Squeegee Boy.” He hung around with the bums on the Bowery. Started taking photographs. First passport pictures, then commercial work. At the age of thirty-five, he upped his game, quit commercial work, became a freelance news photographer.
He went out nights, hung around the police station waiting for the stories to come in over the teletype. Off he went taking pictures of murders, fires, fender benders, wacko kids on their way to juvie hall. He spent two years with no accreditation following the police all around town. In 1938, the cops gave him his own police radio. Weegee could tune in and pick up on what was happening. Most times he got to the crime scene before the cops. The cops thought he must be psychic. This gave rise to the apocryphal story his nickname was the phonetic spelling of “Ouija.” Weegee added a darkroom to the trunk of his car. He took his picture, developed it at the scene, put his print on the back, and sold it to the papers. During his ten years at police headquarters, Weegee said he must have photographed 5,000 murders—“at least one murder every night.”…
More of the story– and more examples of the extraordinary work– at “Through a Lens, Darkly: Weegee’s Photographs of Death and Disaster.”
For more of Weegee in his own words: “Altering life by holding it still”*…
* Weegee
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As we snap it up, we might send pacific birthday greetings to Mildred Lisette Norman; she was born on this date in 1908. Better known by the descriptor she gave herself, “Peace Pilgrim,” she was a non-denominational spiritual teacher, mystic, pacifist, vegetarian activist, and peace activist. In 1952, she became the first woman to walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in one season; she then walked across the United States to speak with anyone she encountered about peace– and journey that lasted for 7 cross-country round-trips over 28 years.
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