The struggle for Palestinian rights is central to radical politics today. The fight for BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions)’ is the sharp end of this. The fury seen in the media and by most politicians as well as the huge sums spent by the Israeli state in countering BDS suggests a movement gaining in momentum
Read moreFighting the Enemy Without: Patriarchy in Bruce La Bruce’s The Misandrists
As sexism – pure, naked sexism and misogyny – rears its ugly ahead in the liberal democratic public sphere, it appears ever more appropriate to look back for insight to the feminist 1970s: a time oft-mythologized1 and (at times) faithfully portrayed as the era of very angry women. The 1970s are a complex moment in North American feminism’s past. The way we re-visit this so-called ‘foundational’ era of the Women’s Liberation Movement, it seems, will play a role in how we can imagine the horizons of feminism’s futures.
Read more“Wanna Define? So Say So!”: David Bryne’s Utopia
Two works sit before me. One, a non-descript jet-black Verso book, containing a controversial and often misunderstood thought experiment from the dialectical philosopher Frederic Jameson. The other is a record album by the great humanist songwriter David Byrne. Both are titled American Utopia. Both attempt to find countertendencies in the social whole in the 21st century, “late-late capitalism”, if you will, countertendencies that perhaps we can cognitively map, if not concretely perceive as utopian, as going beyond the semblance of time and place, a place where nothing ever happens, as “happening” implies going back to the dualism of fact and value that dialectical art and philosophy attempt to transcend. Byrne’s music, both literally and figuratively, provides a soundtrack to what Jameson called postmodernity – a concept about which one can hold agnosticism with regards to hard periodization, but still use to demarcate an aesthetic sensibility.
Read moreTo the Litter Box of History
These pastiche posters portray the victories and transformations of cat-kind following a revolution that has overthrown all relations in which cat is a depraved, enslaved, abandoned or despised being. These repurposed propaganda posters attempt to capture the aesthetic energy and radical, transformative hope of the 20th century revolutions while criticizing the social order that they both replaced and created. The works attempt not to rewrite or document history but rather to create hopeful images of a world in which creatures have escaped the logic of history and point toward a real-possible future.
Read moreBorradores
These illuminated poems appeared in Red Wedge #6, “In Defense of Transgression.”
Read moreThe People's Vote + Notre Dame
Let it have no known leader, the campaign. / Let it be led by cool fresh water, clearer and sweeter, / f ollow the ringing out, we, across the tunnel walls to light, / backs straightened, blinking in the rain.
Read moreWhat's Next?
Artists today are also caught in the Neo-Liberal expectations of competitive self-promotion, which generally exclude the disabled, economically-disadvantaged, lower-classes, aging, female, gender and/or identity non-conforming. The expected commodification of an artist's work and life is profoundly alienating to anyone who doesn't fit, into either mainstream society or mainstream artists' societies. But there have to be spaces for all art; as there has to be a place at the table for all peoples, or it is no longer art (but an extension of imperialism).