Ice House Detroit

Gregory Holm and Matthew Radune plan to freeze one of Detroit's thousands of abandoned homes this winter, encasing it in ice to draw attention to foreclosures that have battered the region.

NPR article on the project

About this project

Project page, check out the roll-over images of urbanisation returning to prairie: http://icehousedetroit.blogspot.com/

The International Privacy Ranking

www.privacyinternation.org

Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress

In February 2008, the President of the French Republic, Nicholas Sarkozy, unsatisfied with the present state of statistical information about the economy and the society, asked, Joseph Stiglitz (President of the Commission), Amartya Sen (Advisor) and Jean Paul Fitoussi (Coordinator) to create a Commission, subsequently called “The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” (CMEPSP).
The report distinguishes between an assessment of current well-being and an assessment of sustainability, whether this can last over time. Current well-being has to do with both economic resources, such as income, and with non-economic aspects of peoples’ life (what they do and what they can do, how they feel, and the natural environment they live in). Whether these levels of well-being can be sustained over time depends on whether stocks of capital that matter for our lives (natural, physical, human, social) are passed on to future generations.
Another key message, and unifying theme of the report, is that the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.

Read it here

One & Other: Walking the Plinth

I have been really interested in Antony Gormley's piece happening at Trafalgar Square because it encompassed all the good things and bad things about working within a community context. For starters there's the shared authorship that creates a product that is difficult to critique from a historical perspective on aesthetics. From a material perspective this work seems like a departure for Gormley. I have read about how the work is boring, highlights mundanity, is patronising and so on... In many ways I don't totally disagree, but I was still drawn to the work as its a huge public art project about participation, and luckily I was able to stand in for someone who missed their flight from Belfast.
As I'm working on the Everyman concept for the next year, I thought this would be an interesting place to doing a small intervention, and what a venue. What I found ultimately remarkable was the spontaneous community that was developed in the street. I went on at 2am on a Thursday thus faced a large amount of drunken loitering and heckling which was great. I felt both empowered and vulnerable and thought this is exactly the risk Gormley has taken. It reminded me of working in the community garden in NYC and having all sorts of obscene interventions that added to the work. It's a healthy dose of reality that I would recommend to any skeptic of the work.
One interesting character in the real stage, the pavements below, was Captain John (you can see him at about 36:36 in the video link below). He was a plinther and had since returned daily becoming part of the routine there. One of the main questions people asked when I was up there was 'what does it mean?', and it was the first question posed to me when I got down... But I wonder, does it need to mean something?
Jenna went up as well at 1pm on Saturday to much more docile crowd of tourists and locals. Many people had no idea what the plinth project was at all, and it was great to overhear all the possible assumptions. I realise that the real work of One & Other was this spontaneous dialogue amongst strangers in the street. If you're just looking up at the plinth you're missing the real artwork....

Everyman Walks the Plinth Video

Images

One & Other is a live artwork by sculptor Antony Gormley.
2,400 participants representing every region of the UK each spend an hour alone on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square for 100 days and nights.

The Unavowable Community

The (first ever) Catalan Pavilion at the Venice biennale 'La Comunitat Incofessable' takes its title from Maurice Blanchot's 1983 book 'La Communauté inavouable' (The Unavowable Community), and from Blanchot's inquiry into the nature and possibility of community and interpreting communism as 'that which creates community'.

The project is divided into three parts: the exhibition taking Blanchot's reference to the library as a space for knowledge; the catalogue (with reprinted texts by Blanchot, as well as Jean Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, etc.) as well as essays and interviews related to the artists projects by Gerard Horta, Iris Dessler, Jacob Lillemose, Manuel Delgado amongst others) and a website which will host a vast archive around the notion of communality.

The thread between the three projects is the questioning of the single authorship, as the artists constantly appropriate preexistent materials (photographs, data...) and reconfigure new archives, new readings of these materials.

Curatorial Text

Prize for Art and Social Change

The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice provides an opportunity to consider the work of more than 35 international cultural producers whose practice engages the public sphere on questions of social justice.
Their approaches intend to not only reflect, but also act upon moments of historic change, breaking the traditional barriers between art, culture, and politics.
The conference will open on the evening of Friday, October 23 with the presentation of the first, inaugural Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, honoring an artist who has committed their life’s work to social change in powerful and productive ways. This prize is the first award of its kind, honoring impact and commitment over market trends. This year, the Prize will be given to The Yes Men

The Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change is an annual $25,000 award named in honor of Mrs. Annenberg’s life-long dedication to supporting the artistic voice in our culture, and to the vital role of art in educating and expanding our cultural dialogue. The Yes Men agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their hijinks to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business. This legendary group of culture jammers is, through their longstanding practice of invading and subverting modes of corporate communication, at the forefront of a movement to produce substantive change in our world. They are well known for projects ranging from impersonating representatives of major corporations to the distribution of thousands of copies of a simulated edition of The New York Times featuring idealistic, progressive headlines.