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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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The City of Toronto is shooting itself in the foot again with a plan to penalise property owners for allowing graffiti to remain on their walls. Maybe city council didn't notice that all those other fun destination cities in the world have a bunch of cool art on their buildings? I guess the plan is to make sure that there's no free culture around for tourists and hipsters from out of town to soak in, thereby driving them onto public squares awash with the ambient glow of corporate billboards.
NOW magazine did a good piece (via TPSC) on the issue last week. I was apalled/amused at this non-savvy quote from Dennis Reid, chief curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario:
It sickens me when I see people spray-painting on old stone buildings. What the hell are they thinking? I can't imagine the citizenry wouldn't want to clean up the mess as much as we can, but at the same time, there are those occasional pieces that are inspired and we should be pausing over.NB: there's a public forum on what makes a beautiful city next week. details here.
Doug Saunders is writing a whole series of columns on the contemporary state of facism in Europe for the Globe and Mail. Last week was Italy, where facism seems to be generally on the rise, today's was Germany where it does not. Last week in Berlin there was an interesting, middleclass anti-neo-nazi march. Saunders wrote about it in the Globe on Monday:
The very presence of fascists, however marginal their movement, brought thousands of people onto the streets, with the sole intention of standing and blocking the Nazis' progress.As it happens, guest poster Gordon Hicks is in Berlin right now and he says Saunders' description is accurate. Here are some of Gordon's notes and pictures of the day...
"It would be the most enormous embarrassment to all Germans if these people were allowed to walk around on this day without being stopped," said Michael Philipps, 44, a soft-spoken academic who stood with hundreds of families and blocked the street in front of the Lustgarten -- the very spot where Hitler held his famous May rally almost exactly 70 years before.
Guest post #2 by Gordon Hicks:
This weekend's event: Neo-nazi's from the under-employed east march in Berlin. Anti-facists, lefties, skinheads and citizens also march to prevent the neos from marching. The police keep a heavily padded riot line between the two groups. Happy to report the anti's outnumber the facists by a large number (5 times or more).
The photo [above] is taken from the north side of Jannowitzbruke (bridge). The protesters are sitting about - I imagine just to block the possible march of the neos. The police line blocks anyone from crossing the river into the center of the protest area.
A quiet unease hangs about - not festive like last weekend's bash in Kreutzberg - the atmosphere is more grim—resolved, actually.
Theses photos are from Alexanderplaz - just north of the centre of the Neo-Nazi march and a five minute walk from the apartment where I am staying. Every once in a while the police troops would get a command and quick-march off to somewhere else, or quick-march back into the plaz.
Below can see the "World Time Clock" with it's groovy 60's motif on top.
The water cannon trucks and armored personel carriers stood ready on the side streets but, happily, didn't see action. I saw dozens of both kinds of military style vehicles around the area. The bulldozer shovels on the front have a cheerful little request: "Please Stand Clear".
- Guest poster Gordon Hicks
The following is a report from Berlin by my friend and colleague Gordon Hicks.
Guest post #1 from Gordon Hicks:
I was just reading your post about police and ideas of 'inherent friction'. Sunday was May 1st and that means the May Day celebrations/riots in Kreuzberg. Since the studio where I am working is right in the middle of Kreuzberg (at Bethanien) we got to wander around the neighbourhood and take it all in.
The police/people duality seemed much more formalized than I am used to. Both sides seem to understand a lot more about it than they have in my past experience.
Most of the day is a huge street party with music and people hanging out being mellow. The photo below was taken in front of the studio building (Bethanien) in the park. Turkish beat music came from the South, rock music from the North.
There was a phalanx of reds marching up and down the neighbourhood in what I guess is a random pattern. They passed by at least three times, each time the group getting larger. Clusters of riot police would go into quick step manouvres in order to get positioned on this or that street in anticipation of the parade passing. (Parade below)
Cops. All sorts. And I mean all sorts. Good Riot-Cops, Just-Doing-Our-Job Riot Cops, and Big-Mean-Motterfucker-In-Black Riot Cops. ( I chickened out taking photos of the last class when I saw them straight arm a passerby.)
-Guest Poster Gordon Hicks
What is it?
quicktime / photos
Readers of this blog will already be familiar with Mr. Nobody (a regular contributor in the comment threads). Well there's a big Mr. Nobody solo show opening on Friday night in Toronto. Here's the blurb:
Hello friends of nobody!
Mr. Nobody is coming out of hibernation for his spring exhibition at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects. Bring Mr. Nobody some luck this Friday the 13th!
'In the Hole'
(video installation and drawings)
May 13 - June 4
site: 1086 Queen West, upstairs
Gallery preview: Friday, May 13, 12-5pm.
Reception: Friday, May 13, 7-10 pm
HOURS: WED-SAT 12-5PM
The "Great Explainer," physicist and teacher Richard Feynman, speaking in 1964 at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (published under the title, "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society," in a collection of Feynman's essays, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Perseus Publishing, 1999) p.108-9:
...[T]here is a kind of responsibility which the scientists feel toward each other which you can represent as a kind of morality. What's the right way and the wrong way to report results? Disinterestedly, so that the other man is free to understand precisely what you are saying, and as nearly as possible not covering it with your desires. That this is a useful thing, that this is a thing which helps each of us to understand each other, in fact to develop in a way that isn't personally in our own interest, but for the general development of ideas, is a very valuable thing. And so there is, if you will a kind of scientific morality. I believe, hopelessly, that this morality should be extended much more widely; this idea, this kind of scientific morality, that such things as propaganda should be a dirty word. That a description of a country made by the people of another country should describe that country in a disinterested way. ... Advertising, for example, is an example of a scientifically immoral description of the products. This immorality is so extensive that one gets so used to it in ordinary life, that you do not appreciate that it is a bad thing. And I think that one of the important reasons to increase the contact of scientists with the rest of society is to explain, and to kind of wake them up to this permanent attrition of cleverness of the mind that comes from not having information, or not having information always in a form which is interesting.
"Frightening" moral philosopher, Mary Midgley, in her book Science and Poetry (Routledge, 2001) p.84:
Current scientific concepts are not adapted to focusing on subjectivity. Indeed, many of them have been carefully adapted to exclude it, much like cameras with a colour filter. [...] Galileo and Descartes saw how badly the study of objects had been distorted by people who treated these objects as subjects, people who credited things like stones with human purpose and striving. So they ruled that physical science must be objective. And this quickly came to mean, not just that scientists must be fair, but that they should treat everything they studied only as a passive, insentient object.
We know that abstraction made possible three centuries of tremendous scientific advance about physical objects. Today, however, this advance has itself led to a point where consciousness has again to be considered. Enquiries are running against the limits of this narrow focus. In many areas, the advantages of ignoring ourselves have run out.
This has happend most notoriously in quantum mechanics, where physicists have begun to use the idea of an observer quite freely as a casual factor in the events they study. Whether or not this is the best way to interpret quantum phenomena, that development is bound to make people ask what sort of an entity an observer is, since Ocam's Razor has so far failed to get rid of it. This disturbance, however, is only one symptom of a growing pressure on the supposedly subject-proof barrier, a pressure that is due to real growth in all the studies that lie close to it.