About ROAR

Here is a music-video I made for a Greek electropunk group wherein I parallel, *not* contrast, my life in the Netherlands to our life in Greece.

Loilok – Disco Punk Economy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2ePzGA-YHg

Amongst the footage in this video:

- the sweepers’ strike at Amsterdam Central station which resulted in overflowing garbage-cans all over the station
- Greek TV channels going blank due to strikes at public and private TV channels
- Greek TV news-item on unemployed and impoverished Greek professionals
- Footage of a shooting incident in Amsterdam
- A Greek friend on the phone talking to his diasporic sister in Germany about his efforts to find a job

No spectacular footage of riots or protests or dogs, just the everyday tedium and quiet frustration of living in a bankrupt country, while immigration to a wealthier country like the Netherlands offers only this much of an escape from the mess back “home”. The video was meant to convey the idea of wandering&moving, in accordance with the energetic music, but going nowhere.

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Solidaridad desde América del Sur. Somos una sola humanidad. Fuerza!

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Please review this book. It is a critique of art and architecture’s complicity with neoliberal capitalism, plus a proposed possible way out.

GK

Gavin Keeney, “Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Cloth (w/ dust jacket), 358 pages. ISBN 978-1-4438-3359-2

I am pleased to announce the imminent release of “Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The essays were written over the past ten years and are presented in two parts, closing with “Ten Theses on Architecture as Art,” an essay written this past June-July proposing a reinvigorated sense of responsibility on the part of the discipline of architecture to counter its self-inflicted complicity with neo-liberal capitalism.

ABSTRACT

“Else-where” is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production from 2002 through 2011. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed in art, the essays are informed by the passage out of post-structuralism and its disciplinary analogues toward the real Real (denoted over the course of the studies as the “Real-Irreal” or “Else-where”).

While architecture nominally addresses an environmental ethos, it also famously negotiates its own representational values by way of its putative autonomy (autonomy as self-interest, versus selflessness); its main repression in this regard is “landscape,” figure of the Other and figure of the Real. Engaging forms of spectrality, and not necessarily speculative intelligence per se, architecture is also “conscious” of its own complicity in capitalist orders, a complicity that in part underwrites its avant-garde forms of agitation since the onset of modern architecture. As a result, and over the course of the twentieth century, architectural vanguards have successively been depleted such that they return only as reified half-measures in the late-modern production of difference. As such, the essay “Actually Existing Ground” (2008) examines the failed promise of Landscape Urbanism.

Since the 1960s, as with the allied arts, architecture has evacuated many of the utopian gestures given to modernism and embraced a form of ultra-contingency in a direct alliance with the post-modern and post-Marxist concession to markets and to cultural production as principal means of establishing formal hegemony. This recourse or surrender to the economic-determinist ethos of post-modernity, regardless of attempts to problematize it and/or critique it through types of what Manfredo Tafuri has called “operative criticism” (works of architecture as criticism), has, arguably, all but failed, and with the suggestive return circa 2011 of new forms of resistance an exit from the accommodating spirit of the times is indicative of the expectation of strenuous, yet highly formal and non-discursive operations within artistic and architectural production.

The essays collected in “Else-where” cross various disciplines, inclusive of landscape architecture, architecture, and visual art, to develop a nuanced critique of an emergent formal regard in the arts that is also an invocation of the highest coordinates given to the arts – formal ontology as speculative intelligence itself – or the return of the universal as utopian thought “here-and-now.”

http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/-Else-where—Essays-in-Art–Architecture–and-Cultural-Production-2002-20111-4438-3359-2.htm

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Can you please embedd our viral videos on “Occupy Wall Street” on your fantastic website:
http://vimeo.com/30241489
http://vimeo.com/29513113

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