Bag of Baghdad
By Patrick Thompson, 2007
Water color and ink on ledger paper, 0cm x 30cm

Battledress
By Pat Thompson, 2007
24cm x 36cm

Mejuan, 2008.
Barcelona, Spain

Sars Palace
By Pat Thompson, 2003
Latex on found image, 5×25

Fear, copyright and a side order of mind-numbing “art”
Royal, 2008
Spraypaint on concrete

A public lecture by Fuyuki Kurasawa, given on March 28, 2008 at the Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University.

How is visuality — understood here as the mutual constitution of the visual and the social (W. J. T. Mitchell) — implicated in the mediated construction of instances of distant suffering in various parts of the world, and what are the effects of such implications? After a brief history of the visual representation of humanitarian crises by Euro-American civil society institutions, the presentation turns to a consideration of the perils and prospects of humanitarian visuality. In particular, I turn to an inescapable aporia of this visual economy, the simultaneous production and negation of the otherness of vulnerable subjects. Finally, the presentation discusses certain strategies for a critical visuality, notably a defence of the image’s interpretive ambiguity as well as practices of phenomenological reintensification and structuralist expansion of the image.

Three key concepts are worth keeping in mind:

1. Visual economy: The distribution and circulation of relations of power that constitute and structure the socio-visual field.
2. Distant suffering: Instances of mass suffering and extreme situational and structural violence that are perpetrated outside the North Atlantic region and which are represented visually via the media.
3. Humanitarian visuality: The set of visual conventions that are consistently reproduced in images of humanitarian crises over time.

Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves lead a group of reporters to visit ground zero at Trinity Site on Sept. 11. 1945
By Pat Thompson. 2006
Ink on braille paper, 20 x 20

Landscape is real-estate. Paintings of the “natural” world are travelogue posters evoking a time and place that no longer exists. The world is no longer divided between the town and country. The planet is now Uber-Urban and Sub-Urban. Today within the economic “reality” of global capitalism landscape painting is nothing more than the evocation of the large suburban lot, where you know you are rich when you cannot see or hear your neighbours. It is a home in the Disney World fantasy of the individual’s natural place surviving untouched and uncorrupted by the corporate collective communism of pollution. Landscape painting is the iconic mantra of private property that lives in denial of the growing global terror of universal communism and its ever rapidly growing collective property - pollution. It spreads like an uncontrollable Stalinist storm of fire and ice across our Mother Earth unchecked.

Holly Friesen in her painting “work in freefall” captures the hope and horror of Omnigothic Neofuturism. Here the horizontal cubism of an environmental Geurnica of the groin finds spiritual threads reminiscent of feudal triptych iconography. Her images are more than just an Orientalist idealization of earth spirits. The pastiche of materials in this painting moves human energy through time and space. This heretical work of visual art has a beginning/middle/and end. Words crawl up and down the flowing spines of hot and cold like kisses of wet spent love turning the viewer’s eye into a licking tongue filled with the sensual taste of raw lust set free from the constraints of consumer society where sex is endlessly sold like bland boiled potatoes to the hungry in a spiritual famine. Pass the salt, and if I could only have a little cabbage broth on the side, then I would be apocalyptically happy.

The raven to one side perhaps says it all. We are doomed. The pure virgin dragon of scientific discourse crashes. Its face is dismembered human fertility. It flaps its angelic wings of material promise, but down it goes anyway. The moon spits human kind back down to earth. Technology is swallowed. We fossilise into a whirling dance of orality as our mouths blister with the collective lies that silences our souls. Yet the cancerous flame of our wonton consumptive desire ignites a spark. With in the split alienation of our cloven existence a fire burns deep and it will rises up like a whore of words howling in the night. The yin and yang will twist and turn. The vaginal face of a wolf will speak. The landscape will burst alive with the language of fire.

A few months ago I took a fallen tile from the Barcelona metro. Days ago I spotted a vacant spot in this row of beautiful tiles near my home and decided to try and interact with the cool mathematics. I guess the best part of the story is that a few blocks from my place is a construction site and in one of the waste bins in the street there were empty bags of cement. In a few of them there was enough for me to concoct the right adhesive to put this up.

The link above, in my opinion holds some powerful ideas that defeat any carcass counter debate to try to salvage the great ICON, Sheppard Fairey’s OBEY GIANT “reputation”.

Perhaps Obey’s humble beginnings with his sticker street campaign had no hidden agenda but it certainly has evolved and blossomed to become something that resembles a multi-national.

The idea that “the medium is the message” has been altered to serve something closer to “I’m a capitalist monster and nothing can hold me back because I believe, and most importantly, my fans believe my lies”. The bottom line has become, “The money is the message”.

* Source: Art For a Change

OBEY is now a multi-million dollar industry whose focus is on clothing and any other item that can hold a logo. Shameless mass promotion and mass production (in sweatshop environments) has brought Fairey’s product to the mecca of mass consumption, to dance in the long corridors of Walmart.

I’m ashamed to share this so called graffiti platform with some one like Fairey but I don’t wish him harm and I don’t believe he should stop promoting creativity and design. When I see one of his “graffiti” posters in the streets of Barcelona, I feel that I’m looking at a brand like any other brand and I feel sad that kids believe the campaign is -the shit-. In that sadness my wish list simply includes a need for him to pull off that mask and reveal the true face of what is an industry. No more Punk references in interviews, no more art talk and hiding behind the word graffiti, no more putting a spin on the “art” that is essentially a slightly altered stolen image that then is calls his own.

* Source: Art For a Change

If you’re a capitalist rock star then be it. If you’re a pop artist, then be a pop artist and say you’re a pop artist. Reference with skill and be humble because, I know, as a professional artist, that Obey’s artistic and creative skills are limited. I always felt uncomfortable when I saw Sheppard’s work and as a kid, I could never put my finger on it. The link above put it all in perspective for me.

GRAFFITO

“Graffito” is singular; “graffiti” is a mass noun.
Graffito and Graffiti make the world go round.
Graffito is a little scratch, a groove on urban skin.
A record without a scratch, is simply called a mandolin.
Graffiti can be found in Tikal on a Mayan tomb,
In Hagia Sophia, like stretch marks on a womb.
A prolific graffito artist was sent to jail.
Was he a bastard for pinning the donkey on a tail?
When French soldiers carved their names,
During Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign,
They were left without a fleet
When the pyramids were stained
An “adult ghetto” is a rigid state of mind:
A Cerebral slum, is scum without a spine.
Social distances are far and near
Stretch your leadership muscles to adhere
In the ghetto, you try to stay alive
Your socks don’t match, and you start to jive.
In the ghetto, your kids get shot at school
Your car does not drive because it has no fuel
In the ghetto, graffito can’t pay the bills
Graffiti feeds the needy when poverty kills
In the ghetto, your heart is frozen to death
Art is life support: it is your last breath
In the ghetto you can’t afford to bleed
Individual pluralism leads to greed.

- Oni the Haitian Sensation

I was going to keep quiet about this for a long while… I wanted to see if it was possible to find mass radical, exciting changes within Graffiti.

Today I broke down and decided to offer up some of the stuff that I’ve been doing just to feed your eyes with an alternative or two.

It’s the kind of art that I want to see in the street but where ever I look, it seems that there’s knuckle draggin’. Just variations of the wild style, tastelesssss broth of the 80s.

If you make art in the street I say to you, take the time to look at your city and really see it. There’s so much more. It’s deep and deeper if you care to look. Old School, Hard Core and Risk don’t have to play part. Take that blinged out ball and chain off and make art that transcends. Let’s not be afraid to reset a standard that was set and handed to us.

INTERVENTIONS:

POST COVERS:

Halsman set up his New York studio and using the 4 x 5 format, twin-lens reflex camera that he had designed in 1947, he prepared to capture one of his most memorable photographs. He suspended an easel, two paintings by Dali (one of which was “Leda Atomica”), and a stepping stool; had his wife, Yvonne, hold a chair in the air; on the count of three, his assistants threw three cats and a bucket of water into the air; and on the count of four, Dali jumped and Halsman snapped the picture. While his assistants mopped the floor and consoled the cats, Halsman went to the darkroom, developed the film, and reemerged to do it again. “Six hours and twenty-eight throws later, the result satisfied my striving for perfection,” wrote Halsman.

The photograph is spectacular. However, there are still a few things that bother me about the “authenticity” of the image. For example, the shadow of the canvas seems not to be exactly as one would expect. Even so, this is art at its finest.

One World
By Peru

I was invited to a group show in Vienna. My idea was against the theme, “Canada VS Spain”, by having a map of Pangea when they were both (and all others) the same place. There is too much fighting in the world already, its time to start helping each other, and create some unity.

Trickle Down Economics

Hate Work (Left)
Man’s tragic flaw has led this beautiful planet towards self destruction (initially he was not supposed to reach the dollar but age stretched the rubber band and i dont have the heart to take it away from him now, he earned it)
By Pat Dyer
Acrylic on wood

Renegade tribes feeling the push for progress (Right)
About 20 million years ago, somewhere in Africa, ape-like creatures, came down out of the trees and began to live on the ground. The story of human life is about adaptation. About 10 thousand years ago, man became an agriculturalist. Settlement gave rise to division of labour; division of labour gave rise to technology; technology gave rise to trade and commerce, with limited resources.
By Pat Dyer
Marker and paint on canvas

USA & Africa: Slave Trade
By Huma and Evoke, circa 2004.
Mural on concrete.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.