Boog Festival

Lots of great stuff going on at the Boog festival this weekend. I would highly recommend Paolo Javier's Poet's Theater gallery tonight, featuring Charles Bernstein, Cori Copp, Dana Ward and many other terrific acts.

Fascist Groove Thang Exercise

Exercise: rewrite these lyrics (from Heaven 17's "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thing") any way you wish:

(Everybody move to prove the groove)
Have you heard it on the news
About this fascist groove thang
Evil men with racist views
Spreading all across the land
Don't just sit there on your ass
Unlock that funky chain dance
Brothers, sisters shoot your best
We don't need this fascist groove thang
Brothers, sisters, we don't need this fascist groove thang

History will repeat itself
Crisis point we're near the hour
Counterforce will do no good
Hot you ass I feel your power
Hitler proves that funky stuff
Is not for you and me girl
Europe's an unhappy land
They've had their fascist groove thang

Brothers, sisters, we don't need this fascist groove thang

Democrats are out of power
Across that great wide ocean
Reagan's president elect
Fascist god in motion
Generals tell him what to do
Stop your good time dancing
Train their guns on me and you
Fascist thang advancing

Brothers, sisters, we don't need this fascist groove thang

Sisters, brothers lend a hand
Increase our population
Grab that groove thang by the throat
And throw it in the ocean
You're real tonight you move my soul
Let's cruise out of the dance war
Come out your house and dance your dance
Shake that fascist groove thang
(Shake it!)

Advancing Feminist Poetics & Activism

Click here for the (more or less) full schedule for Belladonna's upcoming "Advancing Feminist Poetics & Activism" symposium at the CUNY graduate center.

2nd Edition of Over-Sensitivity

Jalal Toufic has released a 2nd edition of his 1996 book, Over-Sensitivity (Sun and Moon Classics), via his Forthcoming Books. Here is what Toufic has to say about the significance of the 2nd edition:

"While many books are first announced as forthcoming (for example in the inflated bios of mediocre academicians, who keep mentioning such books as forthcoming over a period of years), then published, Over-Sensitivity, published originally in Sun & Moon Press’ Classics series in 1996, is here republished, in a revised edition, by Forthcoming Books, this making its status more explicit: even after its publication, it is still forthcoming.

What does a second edition indicate? That in the case of the first edition, one’s fruits were ripe but one was not ripe for one’s fruits (“Oh Zarathustra, your fruits are ripe, but you are not ripe for your fruits!” [Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra])?"
--Jalal Toufic

Like many of the writers and artists who preoccupy Toufic throughout his books (Walt Whitman, Jack Torrence, Gertrude Stein, Francis Bacon), it interests me that Toufic himself is acting as a version artist. A version being a difference that makes a difference; a resurrection that does not happen once but multiply within what Gilles Deleuze calls "a disjunctive synthesis." What surprises me is that under a list of "Books by Jalal Toufic" on the first pages of Over-Sensitivity (2nd ed.) Toufic does not list the 1st editions of (Vampires) and Distracted (the two other books for which Toufic has written 2nd editions). Aren't the first editions equally important as versions of their own forthcoming? Or, on the other hand, possible counterfeits (those 'false' resurrections to which Toufic also refers)?

Paul Thek, Our Contemporary

The micro-management of meat
Under glass mistakes for orifices
Crises the sun where your eyes

Should have been because the dead
Are genderless because no one
Needed to know what's under the hood

Fingerless they can't i.d. you
Underground man hippie fingers
Are like little dicks you make of

Yourself a mask to hide within
Things to hide within the world
Abandoned to it like a tomb.


Some spaces distribute
The body in time was
Wax the body in space
Was a cast unsalvageable
Because no one wants
A masterpiece to be
A crypt of what we will
Have been a difference
Pink makes on your skin.


We cope this risk is an
Answer to the flesh
Anyone's analytic
Of the sublime

Any body's tomb
With whom do you
Identify who will
Not answer to 'me'?

Where bones are laid
To rest who will manage
The dead and those
Who cannot die

I am trying to tell
You something but am
Afraid the power of
Flesh overpowers me

The powers of reliquary
Do not remember me
Every name in history
How do we distribute

Petal pink makes
Malthus blush others
Do the math what you
Encase like head space

Thek the headless
Always our contemporary
Our savage contemporary
Tongue-ring sticks out

From missing prints
Pharaohs abscond
From historical sense
The sense of headlessness

Makes a tomb in the public
Pinko of the real
When fascism flares up
Your art withdraws.


That we are meat
And worship the fact
That God is also meat
A formal feeling comes

We call it a technology
Of the self remember
What we have become
A prayer to blood

A prayer to fake
Blood the mannerist
Sun still winking like
A hole that doesn't

Stink what totality
Doesn't stink of men
Mimics monuments re-
fuses to delay in glass.

The Mobile Archive at Parsons

The Mobile Archive: The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon
Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - 6:30-8:00 p.m.
Parsons The New School for Design
Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
66 Fifth Avenue, New York City
Admission: Free
www.newschool.edu/vlc

In conjunction with the North American debut of the Israeli Center for Digital Art’s Mobile Archive, Art in General and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics co-host a conversation between Galit Eilat, founder of the archive and director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, and Ramallah-based curator and art historian, Reem Fadda.

Eilat and Fadda consider the role of art as a tool for civil disobedience and passive resistance that affects its surroundings, wielded by individuals during times of social or political distress. Within this context they discuss Liminal Spaces, a long-term project examining the possibility of joint action in light of the ever-growing existential hardship of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Video works that were produced during this project will be on view at Art in General as part of the Mobile Archive, a cross-national library of video art.

Galit Eilat is a writer, curator, and the founding director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon. She is co-editor in chief of Maarav, an online arts and culture magazine, as well as academic advisor of the curatorial program at the Technion Extension, Institute of Technology Israel. She lives and works in Tel Aviv. Recently, she has curated and co-curated exhibitions including: Speed of Light, VideoZone, the Fourth International Video Art Biennial in Israel; Never Looked Better, the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora Tel-Aviv; and Chosen, a collaboration between Wyspa Institute of Art and the Israeli Center for Digital Art. Eilat has written for several books, catalogues, and magazines such as ArtPress, Vector Magazine, Lettre International and more. She has co-edited the books 'Never Looked Better' and the recently published 'Liminal Spaces'. She has participated in numerous panel discussions and given lectures and screening programs at Kuda, Centre Pompidou, Van Abbemuseum, Nova Gallery, and other venues and festivals.

Reem Fadda is a Ramallah-based curator and art historian. Fadda was Director of the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA) between 2005-07 and worked as Academic Director to the International Academy of Art – Palestine, which she helped found in 2006, as part of her approach in broadening the perimeters of curatorial experience towards education. She co-curated and been involved in many projects revolving on contemporary topics in the Middle East, especially those pertaining to architecture, space and geopolitics, such as Liminal Spaces 2005-08, Ramallah Syndrome, which is showcased in the Venice Biennial 2009 and Tarjama/Translation currently on view in the Queens Museum of Art. She is the author of "Palestinian Women Artists: The Land = The Body = The Narrative", 2007. She received her MA in Curating from Goldsmiths College, London and was currently awarded the Fulbright Scholarship to pursue her PhD in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, where her research focus is contemporary aesthetic theory and practice of the Middle East.

About the Mobile Archive exhibition at Art in General
From September 24 to October 17, 2009, Art in General will present the North American debut of the Mobile Archive, an international collection of hundreds of video artworks assembled by the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon. The Mobile Archive has been traveling the world since its first stop at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 2007 and includes artists such as Candice Breitz, Koken Ergun, Guy Ben-Ner, Jumana Emil Abboud, Omer Fast, Ruti Sela, Yoshua Okon, Yael Bartana, and Mark Lewis.

Art in General is the only U.S. venue for the Mobile Archive. The exhibition will be presented in multiple formats: visitors will be able to select and watch any video from the archive in the Project Space; view specially curated screenings by independent curators Regine Basha, Adina Popescu and Chen Tamir; as well as attend daily screenings of work by featured artists from the archive.

Opening Reception Thursday, September 24, 2009 from 6-9 pm
Please check www.artingeneral.org for further information.

For Bob Flanagan

We have not yet determined
What a body can do
What death can do

One’s own death indefinitely
Deferred yet certain
Pain becomes the only thing

We can control we have not
Yet determined what the body
Can do the body in pain

Sculpting it surviving despite
Other acts of grace
Drive a nail through your dick

You land on your feet
Pain is a dance with death
Piercing your life your

Lung-filled breasts live
Because you permit
The only mastery left to them.

Free As Air And Water

September 16 - October 27, 2009

Opening reception
Wednesday, September, 16, 7 - 9 pm

Allora & Calzadilla, Amy Balkin, Robert Bordo, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Ross Cisneros, Amy Franceschini and Free Soil, Andrea Geyer, Hans Haacke, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Runo Lagomarsino, Andrea Polli, Marjetica Potrč, Simon Starling, Temporary Services, Oscar Tuazon, Lidwien Van de Ven

Curated by Saskia Bos and Steven Lam

41 Cooper Gallery
The Cooper Union
41 Cooper Square (lower level)
New York, NY 10003-7120

Phone: 212.353.4200
Email: artschool@cooper.edu
www.cooper.edu/art/exhibitions.html

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 6pm
Mondays by appointment only


Free as Air and Water Symposium I:
Artistic responses to self-sustainability and climate change
Wednesday, September 16, 5 - 7pm (before the reception)
The Cooper Union, The Great Hall
7 East 7th Street
Amy Balkin, Hans Haacke, Yates McKee, Andrea Polli, Marjetica Potrč
Moderated by Doug Ashford

Free as Air and Water Symposium II:
Art in relation to human rights and the freedom of expression
Monday, October 12, 7 - 9pm
The Cooper Union, Frederick P. Rose Auditorium
41 Cooper Square
Doug Ashford, Andrea Geyer and Paul Ramirez Jonas, among others

A catalog will be produced documenting the symposia and exhibition and will be available to purchase after the exhibition. Please check the School of Art website for additional information.
This project was funded in part by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robert Lehman Foundation, and Duggal Visual Solutions.