Taiwan’s NMA.TV’s hilarious take on the protests in Turkey
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Green Absinthe by Frederick Seidel
‘Twas brillig and as if I’d drunk
Green absinthe the night before.
The bed felt like an upper bunk
Ten miles above the bedroom floor.
Maybe it’s because I did,
Maybe it’s because I do
Drink a bathtub of poison gas each night and kid
Myself I’m still able to.
Hey, something is coming—what’s that glow?
It’s snow or rain, it’s spring.
It’s chemical weapons. It’s baseball spring training. Whoa!
Mariano Rivera throws a wicked cut fastball—a vicious,
delicious thing!
Day after day of gray
For Obama in his second term,
And trying not to be poisoned by the horror in Syria today
The apple is trying to digest the worm.
Bashar al-Assad (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
The dead about to lead him to his doom.
The dead in the streets gape and gasp.
The dead smell like chlorine.
Their dead nostrils tried to breathe the asp.
There’s a waitress at Cafe Luxembourg named Maureen.
Maureen, your eyes are green.
Your parents crossbred Ireland with Russia.
The bloody blarney of the Troubles, ‘tis obscene, Maureen,
And the Kremlin percussionists, if they can, they’ll crush ya.
Yeats walked on the moon and spent the night there.
Back on earth, found his rhetoric and politics and splendor
and rage.
Soviet Mandelstam rose like Christ from the nightmare,
Rises from the gulag, sunrise on the page.
Something is coming more than we know how.
More than we know how. An asteroid. Soon.
A world-destroying future is exploding toward us now.
Yangon hurtles toward Rangoon.
Maureen, I think I’d better order while one still can!
I’d like the Syria tartare, please, to start.
Then tender baby baboon from the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Picking a dessert is the hard part.
Frieze video on Richard Mosse’s The Enclave
To get a better idea of what I meant in my previous post, on war art at the Irish pavilion in Venice, here’s a video by Frieze, the art magazine.
(Source: http://player.vimeo.com/)
Ireland in Congo, in pink! (Or the trouble with war art)
At the Irish pavilion in Venice, named the enclave, the above picture is even a lot more, well, pink. Together with a series of cleverly shot videos, the stills form a psychedelically coloured documentation of fighters roaming the wilds of Congo. Northern Kivu, Goma and environs, etc. It is an intense work by Richard Mosse, shot on discontinued army stock that was meant to aid the detection of camouflage uniforms. Judge for yourself:
I actually, really, truly, wonder if you can spot the fighters any faster than if it were shot on regular Fuji-film or Kodak or whatever. But that may be due to Mosse’s idiosyncratic colouring. That part was not clear. Let me be clear about one thing: In my opinion this works as art. It’s a beautiful installation and that’s where the problem may reside: Does it use, utilise, instrumentalise, glamourise etc. war in any way? I’d say yes but I do wonder if it matters. Mosse raises my journalistic hackles immediately by having someone declare in the curatorial text (the genre should be banned) that his work proposes a new way of looking at photojournalism. Spare me! Journalism and photojournalism have been reinvented so many times now that it’s sucked drier than… And what does it mean anyway? But setting aside my immediate antipathy, I do recognise that the images are powerful and that is important in itself:
I have a couple of friends who hold strong opinions on the issues of war photography, art and Congo. I’ll try to get their reaction. Stay tuned…
Mid-East art in Venice dwells on conflicts present and past
Palestinian cardboard boxes taking over the garden of the Venice art school at the 55th Venice Biennale as part of Bashir Makhoul and Aissa Deebi’s Otherwise Occupied. Palestine is participating with a collateral event and not as a country. Deebi, whose film is showing inside the building said:
“The contemporary moment is a disaster but it’s exciting for creative practice”
Deebi’s work takes a deeper intellectual look at the conflict while Makhoul’s installations works on a more emotional level and is fun too: visitors can add to the jumble occupying the garden with a box of their own design. The work also reflects the idea that even the occupation is temporary, said Makhoul.
Iraq is very much preoccupied with its own recent past and with the effect that it is still having on the present. In May alone more than 1000 people were killed in renewed violence.
In Saddam is Here, Jamal Penjweny does the once unthinkable and places the image of the now executed dictator in a series of places where he would have been highly unlikely to appear. A reference possibly to the American hunt for Saddam. Or to the idea that Saddam is still very much present in Iraq, at least his violent spirit?
The rest of the pavilion is very much focused on daily life in Iraq and its hardships, a lot of materials re-purposed and ersatz rugs. Plus some very funny but very dark cartoons by Abdul Raheem Yassir.
To stay in the same neighbourhood, Iran’s cheap mullah’s are not funding a national pavilion but an Iranian curated the show Love me, Love me not, in which several Iranians participated. It’s not hard to see what’s on their mind:
But in case it is actually hard to see, this is oil streaming down a gold pyramid named ‘Mother of Nation’ by Iranian artist Mahmoud Bakhshi. I swear I saw a nuclear power sign glimmer through from the inside.
And then, purely for fun if you ask me, Farhad Moshiri’s magazine covers printed on mini rugs:
(Update: I overlooked the rugs with holes in, um, strategic places apparently referencing censorship. My bad.)
Getting back to the focus on the past, Lebanon’s Akram Zaatari deserves a prize for the greatest WTF? factor. Many a Lebanese did a double take upon walking into their country’s pavilion and hearing Hebrew. Relax, it was part of a documentary near the end of the very handsomely produced Letter to a Refusing Pilot. Here’s a screenshot of an explosion in the water, presumably off Sidon:
The idea harks back to Israel’s 1982 assault on Lebanon during which an Israeli pilot refused to target a school in Zaatari’s home town and dropped his bombs in the sea (another pilot did not have such qualms a bit later on). The pilot is oddly absent from most of the piece but Zaatari is not, he keeps reliving his and his country’s violent past.
Not much conflict or much of anything else really at the Egypt, UAE, and Kuwait pavilions. Syria’s was way too far to bother with (maybe isolated on purpose? containment?)(One more update: A, uhm, progressive British major newspaper source defined the Syrian pavilion as, and I paraphrase, Aaaaaaarggghhhh). And conflict was only conspicuous by its absence at the Bahrain effort. Instead we got a woman in Abaya with fish!
Finally, Saudi Arabian art was present as a collateral event organised by its Edge of Arabia promoters. There was conflict there, gangs, in its Takki Cinema of Arabia project. I could say something but will gracefully refrain.
WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?
The deepest point in the ocean!
About – Yet another new blog
Enjoy all my spiked stories, or stories that would never even have been commissioned in the first place. Europe and the Middle East are my usual stomping grounds but I like to mix it up, so watch this space. I’m a journalist and writer for money – if I can flog it, it won’t appear here. If interested you can keep an eye on The Financial Times, The National and Jane’s Intelligence Review, look for Ferry Biedermann, that’s me.
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