The media has zoned in on a project by Wafaa Bilal (teaching at NYU Tisch School of the Arts). He had the surgery for a project neatly titled The 3rd I. See Bilal’s 3rd I site

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Dictionary of War | At least, when we create concepts, we are doing something.
Interesting resource.

DICTIONARY OF WAR is a collaborative platform on the issue of war – presented by scientists, artists, theorists and activists at four public, two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin.

DICTIONARY OF WAR is about polemics in various respects: It seeks confrontation with a reality that is characterised by the concealment of power relations the more that one talks about war and peace. But it is also about finding out to what extent war may function as an “analyzer of power relations” that constitutes current changes.

From Martha Rosler’s discussion (see link Torture, Terror, Tranquility):

In 1982 I picked up a copy of the leading newsmagazine Newsweek with a painting on the cover, a modest portrait of a seated, ordinary looking young woman, but with exposed breasts. The headline was THE NEW REALISM. I flipped through to the first article, a full-page guest editorial, “The Case for Torture.” I was shocked, as I was meant to be, for this article was a provocation. US president Ronald Reagan was belligerently ratcheting up the Cold War, smashing Jimmy Carter’s détente by planting nuclear Cruise missiles in Western Europe … and some obscure nut had made his way onto Newsweek’s front page arguing for the US to embrace torture as policy? Officially, of course, the nation was on the side of justice and human rights. Torture by the Latin American military and death squads reportedly took place under the eye and even the tutelage of the US—all unreported in the mainstream. News of widespread torture and brutalization of prisoners and suspects in Vietnam had likewise been swept under the rug. As signatory to the Geneva Convention, the United States insisted on the need for dignified and humane treatment of military prisoners—at least in public.

War is not a video game – Iraq war – Salon.com.

I have been thinking my way through the relationship (if any – causitive) betwen gaming violence and aggression (violence)). Too simplistic?

This article perhaps looks again at this in the light of the Iraqi war. Here is a quote from the abstract of my thesis:

It was found that distinctions between ‘war as a game’ and the actual event are being lost within ‘simulation revenge scenarios’ where the borders distinguishing gaming violence, television violence and revenge scenarios are increasingly indefinable. War can then be viewed a spectacle where the actual event is lost in a simplified simulation.

Since the late 1960S, “site-specific” art has undergone various permutations. While the earlier phases challenged the decontextualized space of the museum, highlighting the experiential and phenomenological nature of the works, more recent developments have attempted to revive the criticality of the practice by calling into question the cooptation of “site-specific” art by market forces and mainstream institutions. In One Place After Another, Miwon Kwon provides us with an overview of these transformations, while working through the ambiguities and contradictions, or the “doubleness,” inherent in “site-specificity.” She also offers a theory of art and site that is applicable to the larger areas of our social, economic and political life.

via One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity – Media – Book Review | Afterimage | Find Articles at BNET.

Artists : John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

his films shown here

his filmography here

Guidelines prompt artists to take cover.
This news article in a Sydney paper discusses the effects of police raids and and state interference in artists practice.

What is Art?

Flea ridden indeed! Analyze the question and you get the premise for an avant-garde. No-one asks that question anymore everyone even
philistines know what art is and knows what they like. I’d pose the question differently and ask what is the difference between art and
craft or maybe what is the difference between art and a theory of art. 

SEE  thierry ehrmann – blog.:   An interesting and compelling case of the court order for destruction of a  3,123 works of art made as an installation on the property of the artist in Southern France. Reason (ostensibly) .. not complying with strict building codes re architecture in the region. The artist and supporters are taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights in the framework of Article 10 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

See this short film

December 18, 2009  Demeure du Chaos – Abode of Chaos – thierry Ehrmann – St Romain au Mt d’Or – Press Release:

On 9 December 2009, the Abode of Chaos celebrated 10 years of combat for freedom of expression.

The Cassation Court’s criminal chamber presiding over a second appeal has delivered an order dated 15 December 2009 for the destruction of the 3,123 works of art forming the corpus of the Demeure du Chaos created by the artist and sculptor thierry Ehrmann in 1999.

Callum Morton’s Valhalla

His work Valhalla is a response and a replica I guess of a house his architect father built – he felt it was his father’s best work but also cause of a financial crisis which saw the house sold and family displaced, Valhalla– hand tagged by Morton with graffiti, pock-marked as if by shrapnel or shell attack and spewing smoke from the upper floor- takes it point of departure from deep-held memories of osmotically absorbed modernism and a familial back-story perhaps still not full articulated. (from SMH).

Valhalla

Boris Groys, Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility / Journal / e-flux.

Boris Groys brings up that ‘fear’ (on the part of practitioners in particular) that instead of actually changing the world, art only makes it look better “causes a great deal of frustration within the art system, in which the predominant mood appears to almost perpetually shift back and forth between hopes to intervene in the world beyond art and disappointment (even despair) due to the impossibility of achieving such a goal.

Groys resonse to this begins with “The problem is not art’s incapacity to become truly political. The problem is that today’s political sphere has already become aestheticized” (here he moves into the territory of the public face of politician generating large amounts of visual mnaterial – as do Hollywood stars…