sabato, luglio 31, 2004
bagarre tra giganti in Parlamento...idioti che sperano ancora nel federalismo e ladri che cercano di ridarsi dignità...
giovedì, luglio 29, 2004
droghe di guerra: http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1270902,00.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/story/0,12976,1271851,00.html
avrei preferito che gli fossero stati concessi altri giri di giostra. "E' morto Tiziano Terzani: lo scrittore e giornalista aveva 66 anni. Lo ha annunciato la moglie Angela: «Il 28 luglio, nella valle di Orsigna - si legge in una dichiarazione di Angela Terzani - è serenamente scomparso o, come preferiva dire lui, ha lasciato il suo corpo, Tiziano Terzani. La cerimonia di addio si terrà nella Sala d'Armi di Palazzo Vecchio a Firenze, venerdì 30 luglio, alle ore 17.30."
Fassino e Rutelli, lungimiranti timonieri dell'opposizione, non evitano di scivolare in inutili dichiarazioni...proni al candidato Kerry (lume di ogni cambiamento!) assicurano che in caso di sua vittoria, la permanenza in Iraq, come compagnoni dei gringos a stelle e strisce, è assicurata...perché si tratterà di tutt'altra cosa! BASITO
mercoledì, luglio 28, 2004
visto che nessuno si ricordava di lui, il piccolo Lunardi (ministro delle infrastrutture e dei trasporti) se ne esce con una stupidaggine (detto in termini cortesi): mettere dei pedaggi anche su alcune strade statali!!! per racimolare soldi per migliorarle!!!! forse nessuno gli ha spiegato che le abbiamo GIA' pagate, e anche profumatamente, e adesso pretendiamo di usarle GRATIS!
se si patteggia un'indennità di servizio e non si fa tanto "casino" il silenzio è d'oro! (http://ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/27-Luglio-2004/art56.html)
martedì, luglio 27, 2004
Un mostro per l'estate di MASSIMO CARLOTTO - "Quelli come Luciano Liboni li ho sempre definiti gli «insofferenti». Insofferenti a tutto: alla società, alle regole, alle divise e alle logiche della malavita organizzata. Alcuni li ho conosciuti personalmente. Negli anni Settanta soprattutto, oggi sono una razza in via di estinzione. Come il lupo Liboni, appunto. K. si è beccato un proiettile nella schiena mentre fuggiva con un barchino nei canali veneziani. T., stanco di fuggire, decise di affrontare i carabinieri impugnando una mitraglietta. S., ferito dopo l'ennesima rapina terminò le munizioni, anche l'ultima cartuccia che aveva riservato per se stesso, e adesso sul suo fascicolo c'è un timbro rosso con la scritta «fine pena: mai». F., il più fortunato, riuscì ad arrivare in India e di lui sono arrivate solo voci. La più ottimista narra dell'incontro con una ricca americana e di una villa con piscina a Los Angeles. Quella più realista descrive un vicolo e una siringa piantata in un braccio. In comune gli insofferenti hanno il destino fottuto. O morti, o in galera. Per morirci o per uscirne quando ormai è troppo tardi. Anche Liboni, il cinghiale, il lupo, che giornali e televisioni hanno trasformato nel giallo dell'estate, è fottuto. Lui lo sa meglio di tutti. Per questo spara. Ma non da ora. Sono due anni che tira il grilletto per non farsi prendere. Ha deciso che in galera non ci torna più. Meglio la bocca che sa d'asfalto e una pozza di sangue che si allarga sotto il corpo che essere rinchiuso di nuovo. C'è chi accetta il carcere come un incidente di percorso della professione criminale e chi, invece, dice basta. Liboni sa di essere un morto che fugge. La regola numero uno dell'ambiente è mai sparare a uno sbirro. Altrimenti sono dolori. E lui ha sparato per uccidere: due colpi. Tanto per essere sicuri. Se finisce in manette, prima del carcere, rischia di cadere dalle scale e farsi male sul serio. E poi il processo in corte d'assise. Una proforma per pronunciare la parola ergastolo. E alla sua età speranze di uscire non ce ne sono proprio. Se ingaggia un altro conflitto a fuoco ha ben poche possibilità di uscirne vivo. Ormai è un bersaglio. Se venisse ucciso da un geometra-giustiziere voglioso solo di provare sul campo la sua nuova Glock calibro 40, nessuno avrebbe nulla da ridire. Scriverebbero che il lupo o il cinghiale è stato abbattuto. Il circo mediatico montato su questo caso è pronto a tutto. Già si leggono notizie vergognosamente prive di senso. L'epilogo ne sarà il trionfo. In attesa della parola fine si scandaglia il passato. Ma è inutile cercare spiegazioni psicologiche sull'agire degli «insofferenti». Sono solo scelte solitarie di ribellione votate alla sconfitta. E Liboni è un perdente che non riscuote nessuna simpatia. Nelle redazioni si fanno i salti mortali per costruire un personaggio dalle attitudini criminali di alto profilo. In realtà è lampante che il lupo è solo un balordo specializzato in uffici postali, con qualche conoscenza in quella mala che ha frequentato nelle patrie galere o nei bar di provincia. Il fatto è che è difficile spiegare agli italiani che nell'era dell'antiterrorismo, degli aeroporti blindati, dei super poliziotti, delle guerre preventive, non si riesca ad arrestare una mezza tacca. E allora si esagera, si vagheggiano rapporti internazionali. E si sprecano fiumi di inchiostro sulla lucidità criminale del latitante. Uno che spara in testa a un benzinaio perché scoperto su un'auto rubata è solo un pericoloso cretino. Da allora Liboni non è migliorato. Ha imboccato la sua strada senza uscita. Corre come un cinghiale nella macchia. Nella prima pianura lo aspettano i cacciatori con i fucili puntati. Vivo o morto sarà il trofeo dell'estate." (dal manifesto di oggi)
With his contorted females and homes for terrorists, Thomas Schütte has gone where few artists dare to tread. By Adrian Searle - Tuesday July 27, 2004 - The Guardian - I came to Thomas Schütte's show, Kreuzzug, or Crusade, late. It has already travelled to France and Switzerland; it has now reached K21 in Düsseldorf, the elegant and recently remodelled contemporary art museum in Schütte's home town. The show, expanded for Düsseldorf, is enormous, covering Schütte's entire range. There are things that make me laugh, things that are disarming, lovely, small things that clench my heart and monumental things that I can't quite believe are being made in the first years of the 21st century. Schütte's art is not dependent on a single style, manner, material or touch. It has many strands. He makes watercolours and drawings and table-top architectural models: houses, a yellow Perspex garage, a mountain from a resin-soaked blanket, a brutalist grey factory rising out of a magenta fishtank, a big black building with an empty disco on the ground floor, with little disco lights winking on and off. He makes polychrome, wildly glazed, enormous ceramic heads and smaller glazed-clay "sketches" that sit on racks as though cooling from the kiln. He has built a nuclear power station. You can stand in the cooling tower and be thankful Schütte is not a physicist. Taking his art as a totality, as we must, doesn't mean that everything is equal, or that there aren't better or worse pieces, major and minor works. Nor does the fact that Schütte does many things mean that his art lacks a centre. Rather, it signals a deeper sense that there are many paths and stories an artist might tell. Most artists only ever do one thing. In Schütte's case, the cumulative effect gets more powerful the more he produces, the more directions he goes in, the more he complicates things. This is rare. Most artists don't get better - they just get boring. Schütte, by contrast, is still interested in surprising himself. The title, Crusade, makes the show sound as if the artist was on a mission. Schütte is fond of such small ironies, and is frequently self-parodic. One group of ink and watercolour drawings, depicting wilting flowers, is called My Private Kosovo. One thinks of a Balkanised brain at war with itself, a contested inner life; and also of the strangeness of Gus Van Sant's 1991 movie My Own Private Idaho, with its daydreaming, narcoleptic hero. One might take Kreuzzug as celebrating creativity, but Schütte's art is as often melancholic. Among the long series of prints and watercolours there is an etching of a steamer on the horizon, the words "Wrong Boat" scratched on to the image. The tabletop architectures include a home-made doll's house, with a toy plastic figure standing in an empty upper room; a model woodwork den is beneath, and the entire house is set about with pots of dying ivy, the whole encased in a cheap gilded cage. Another group of table-top dwellings, called (roughly) Holiday Homes for Terrorists, have brightly coloured perspex walls and polished wood roofs like coffin lids, their chimneys set at rakish angles, which reminded me of the dorsal fins of sharks. There is something sinister here in the optimistic modernist buildings. These are the kinds of houses that the middle classes might build for themselves in postwar, consumerist Germany, houses where history is repressed and where the kids simmer with resentment, growing up to be terrorists. Or is this a joke? It has been said that the best critique of a work of art is not what any critic might write, but another work of art. This exhibition - with its jumps in scale, its abstractions and imaginary stage-sets, its toy cars and figurines and giant, lumbering figures (Michelin Man meets the bad Terminator) - allows us to see the extent to which Schütte has been engaged in a dialogue not just with himself, but with the past, with 20th century sculpture and its relation to architecture, the city, the world that we and the artist inhabit. His "public art" projects - including his forthcoming Hotel for the Birds for Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth - are themselves wary of the notion of public art. Schütte's work is the product of the antagonisms between modernism and conceptualism, larger histories and the personal. His engagement with modernism can never be uncritical. Certain of his table-top works poke fun at brutalism, at functionalism, at the way we live. His etchings, funny and sardonic though they often are, show a man beleaguered, laughing things off, sending out images as love letters, as cries for help, as small celebrations of the individual human spirit. Mass culture always turns the intimate into voyeuristic spectacle. At the same time, Schütte makes huge ceramic heads: some calm and Buddha-like, others devilish or baleful. Their gorgeous colouring and decorative surfaces, the twisted ears and heavy brows, make me think of dictators and gods. What's the difference? More difficult, dangerous and daring still is his ongoing series of oversize, distorted steel and bronze women. With these works, Schütte has entered a territory that sculptors have, for all kinds of reasons, shied away from for several decades. Even as I look at them, I wonder whether it is still possible to make such monumental, deeply sexualised sculptures of female bodies - more importantly, whether it is still possible for a man to do so. But if not, why not? The women's forms sometimes begin as almost academic, anatomically correct figures, but have been rollered, twisted and contorted in various ways, as though not just by the hand or by craft, but by the id and the libido. Their morphology, including their enlargements and extreme adjustments, owes as much to earlier sculpture as it does to Schütte's own imagination. Formally, they play every game in the book: they are squeezed, pummelled, extruded, made bulbous, deformed and accentuated. Different parts of individual figures are worked in different ways. A head can remind us of Lipchitz, Maillol, Matisse, Henry Moore (the holes! The poo on the plinth!), Louise Bourgeois, avant-gardists and academics alike. One curved, arching spine, ridged with vertebrae, cleaves the air as a keel braves water. The spine of another figure is a deep, smooth groove. But Schütte hasn't just looked at other art; he has spent as much time looking at and remembering actual bodies. As I walk around the steel flatbeds on which these figures are raised, I come to one head that is a collapsed souffle of rust, and another who, in sleep, evokes a great tenderness. Sexual desire performs impossible distortions on the mental image of the body of the beloved, and one's sense of one's own body. I think this is what Schütte has engaged with here, in these most physical of his works. If there is tenderness and violence in them, it is essentially sculptural. These women remind you, in intimate flashes, of moments on beds and beside beds, lovers' beds and deathbeds - but they never let you forget that they are images, as they slide from one state to another. This is where their liveliness is. I cannot look at them except as a man. Can I do other than accept my own looking? What matters more than praise is what an artist does to your thinking. Kreuzzug is a brave, generous show. For anyone remotely interested in what sculpture can be, what art can be, I advise you to go. · Thomas Schütte - Kreuzzug is at K21 Kunstsammlung, Düsseldorf, until September 19. Details: 00 49 (0) 211 8381 630.
lunedì, luglio 26, 2004
che degli alpinisti abbiano portato a termine la loro impresa sul K2 fa anche piacere, si sorvola su costi e sforzi fatti da anonimi sherpa per permettere il tutto, ma non si può passare in silenzio la stoltaggine di affermazioni del tipo: "Abbiamo domato il mostro"...piccoli pidocchi che si sentono domatori di qualcosa che neanche comprendono...e rispettano!
domenica, luglio 25, 2004
ma quale è la differenza, se non di nome (Bush o Kerry) tra due candidati che per farsi eleggere spendono montagne di dollari? penso nessuna
quando in un afoso fine luglio vedo le forze dell'ordine arrancare nella cattura di un braccato disperato penso alle rassicuranti parole di Pisanu sul controllo del territorio e dell'ordine pubblico!
sabato, luglio 24, 2004
The whole world in our hands - Controversy over ownership of its treasures obscures the British Museum's purpose. By offering everyone insights into cultural history, argues its director Neil MacGregor, the museum promotes a greater understanding of humanity - Saturday July 24, 2004 - The Guardian - Clues to the past (clockwise from top left): one of the Benin bronzes, the Rosetta Stone, Assyrian palace reliefs and the Parthenon Marbles. Photos: Graham Turner For many, the icon of the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, that administrative by-product of the Greek imperial adventure in Africa. But I want to begin with an object from the other end of the continent. It is a chair, pieced together from fragments of weapons decommissioned in Mozambique after the amnesty that ended the civil war in 1992, by the artist Kester as part of the project Transforming Arms into Plough Shares. It's almost the first thing the visitor now sees when entering the Africa Gallery at the museum and it is, I think, for any viewer, a disconcerting and thought-provoking object. When we look at the arms-chair, we realise we are looking at guns made in Britain, Europe, the US. It's a potent emblem, I think, of the complexities linking Africa to the rest of the world. On the one hand, the artist wanted his sculpture to be in the British Museum, and Mozambique at the end of the civil war chose to join the Commonwealth. Yet the chair speaks of a long relationship of commercial, political and military exploitation. It is also, I believe, an object that achieves one of the fundamental purposes for which the British Museum was set up by Parliament in 1753, and for which it still exists today: to allow visitors to address through objects, both ancient and more recent, questions of contemporary politics and international relations. On a nearby plinth is another sculpture, Big Masquerade, by Sokari Douglas Camp, a Nigerian woman who for the last 20 years has lived in London. More than life-size, made of large chunks of metal styled as though fabric, it represents a masquerade of the sort that members of her family in Nigeria take part in. It is a view of Africa made by an African, but one that could have been given this physical form only outside Nigeria. Douglas Camp is very clear that she couldn't, as a woman, have had a career as a metal sculptor in Nigeria. On display nearby are the Benin bronzes, some of the greatest achievements of sculpture from any period. The brass plaques were made to be fixed to the palace of the Oba, the king of Benin, one above the other, a display of technological virtuosity and sheer wealth guaranteed to daunt any visitor. At the end of the 19th century, the plaques were removed and put in storage while the palace was rebuilt. A British legation, travelling to Benin at a sacred season of the year when such visits were forbidden, was killed, though not on the orders of the Oba himself. In retaliation, the British mounted a punitive expedition against Benin. Civil order collapsed (Baghdad comes to mind), the plaques and other objects were seized and sold, ultimately winding up in the museums of London, Berlin, Paris and New York. There they caused a sensation. It was a revelation to western artists and scholars, and above all to the public, that metal work of this refinement had been made in 16th-century Africa. Out of the terrible circumstances of the 1897 dispersal, a new, more securely grounded view of Africa and of African culture could be formed. What do these objects, singly and in combination, offer the viewer? It seems to me that the throne of weapons, the masquerade figure, the Benin bronzes, allow a range of different approaches - personal, political, sacred, military, historical, cultural and international. I don't know where else a visitor can apprehend Africa in so many contexts. A collection that embraces the whole world allows you to consider the whole world. That is what an institution such as the British Museum is for. In 1753, Parliament decided to buy the collection and library of the scholar- physician Hans Sloane and set up the British Museum as the first national museum in the world. It was an act of intellectual idealism, and political radicalism. It is hard to know how far the MPs and grandees who presided over its birth had thought through the consequences of creating a public space for intellectual inquiry and the dissent that necessarily follows it. But the ideals articulated by the museum's founders were without doubt part of the Enlightenment conviction that knowledge and understanding were indispensable ingredients of civil society, and the best remedies against the forces of intolerance and bigotry that led to conflict, oppression and civil war. It was one of the first institutions to be called British, and it's worth asking the question: "British, as opposed to what?" The first answer is surely that it was the British, not the Royal Museum. Unlike those princely royal collections across Europe, where the subjects were from time to time graciously admitted at the will of the sovereign (as was still the case with the royal pictures here in Britain), the new museum in London was to be the collection of all citizens, where they could come free of charge and as of right. This was an extraordinary notion in 1753. It laid the foundation of a quite new concept of the citizen's right to information and understanding, comparable to the founding of the BBC and the Open University, or the modern right of access to the internet. Linda Colley, writing about the 18th-century construction of "Britishness", has focussed on two key elements: that it was anti-Catholic and, on the whole, anti-French. Only eight years before, in 1745, Britain had looked over the edge of the abyss at civil war, the Jacobite rebellion and the alarming possibility of a return to an authoritarian state on something like the French model. The foundation of the British Museum was part of the reaction to that defining moment. The Catholic model of authority, as seen from London, was one where intellectual inquiry was limited, controlled, and often prohibited. On the political plane, France provided the clear demonstration that in an absolutist society, even one only idiosyncratically Catholic, true intellectual liberty was denied. The British Museum is often contrasted with Diderot's Encyclopedia. Where the conceptual French characteristically wrote a book, the empirical British collected things and put up a building. But the key difference is surely that Diderot was put in prison and the Encyclopedia banned, whereas the British Museum was created by parliament specifically to promote intellectual inquiry, and to encourage the discovery of new kinds of truth. In 1753, London was a city prone to bouts of violent religious intolerance. In that year Parliament voted to give civil rights to the Jewish population only to withdraw them a few months later in the face of public protest. In 1780, the Gordon riots would show how explosively strong anti-Catholic feeling could be. Study of the different societies and religions of the world would, it was hoped, generate tolerance and understanding. Like Gulliver returning from his travels, the scholar and visitor to the British Museum would see that there are many good ways of organising the world. The original collection contained books, rocks, plants, animals, and scientific instruments - all the world, physical, natural and human, under one roof. Artefacts from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt were complemented by objects from societies Europeans had hardly heard of. The new museum soon received objects and specimens collected by members of Captain Cook's expeditions from the islands of the Pacific, from the north-west coast of North America, and from Australia. These objects raised all kinds of questions about the origins and practices of communities dizzyingly remote from European understanding, and impossible to square with the received theories of world history. To ensure that the collection would be held for the benefit of citizens, and not the purposes of the crown, Parliament hit upon a solution of extraordinary ingenuity and brilliance. They borrowed from private family law the notion of the trust. The decision that the museum would be run not as a department of state, but by trustees had - and still has - crucial implications. Trustee ownership confers duties rather than rights. Trustees must derive no benefit for themselves, but hold the collection exclusively for the advantage of the beneficiaries. The collection cannot be sold off. The museum was set firmly outside the commercial realm, a position epitomised by the principle of free admission. Even more astonishingly, it was in large measure removed from the political realm. Trustees are not allowed by law merely to follow government orders: they have to act as they judge best in the interest of beneficiaries, including, crucially, future and unborn beneficiaries. Who are the beneficiaries for whom the trustees hold the collection? Startlingly, they are not just the citizens of Britain. The British Museum was from the beginning a trust where the objects would be held "for the use of learned and studious men [in 1753 they were mostly men], both native and foreign". In his will, Sloane had declared his desire that his collection should be preserved "for the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons". The rest of the world has rights to use and study the collection on the same footing as British citizens. The original focus of the museum's curiosity was inevitably the ancient world and the cultures of Greece, Rome and the Bible that dominated 18th-century thinking about the world. The collections would enable these cultures to be addressed through things, not just words. The study and classification of objects began to reveal a history different from the familiar narrative of the texts known and studied for centuries. And soon other texts, long unreadable, complicated the story yet further. The supreme example of this transformational new understanding is of course the Rosetta Stone. Once it was possible to read history from the perspective of ancient Egypt, it became clear that the account presented in the Hebrew Old Testament had to be robustly questioned. The literal truth, the absolute authority, of scriptural tradition could not easily resist the kinds of advances in historical knowledge unlocked by the Rosetta Stone. The deciphering of ancient scripts changed for ever the way Europeans were able to imagine the story of humanity, destroying centuries of received authority about the past with repercussions as important for our understanding of time and history as the geological studies of the same period. And it was not just Egypt. In 1872, George Smith, an assistant in the museum, deciphered a neo-Assyrian seventh-century BC tablet from Nineveh. He found that it told the story of Utnapishtim, who had been warned by the gods that there would be a great flood that would destroy the world. He built a boat and loaded it with everything he could find. He survived the flood for six days while mankind was destroyed. At the end of the flood he sent a dove and a swallow out and they came back because they could not find dry land. Then he sent a raven, which did not return, and he knew the floods had subsided. On reading the tablet, Smith "jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself". Quite apart from being an understandable cause of extreme excitement, this was proof positive that the Biblical story of Noah was not unique. A different man in a different place was told by a different god, or, even more alarmingly several gods, to take his precautions. None of this proves or disproves any historical fact, nor indeed any religious creed. But this kind of comparative religious study changes the status of all claims to exclusive truth of whatever kind. An essential part of such liberating understanding is the recognition that within the same museum object, different histories, meanings, and functions may freely cohabit. Here again, the fact that we are the British Museum, and not a French one, is significant. Implicit within French museum theory is the notion that sacred objects entering museum collections must be entirely divorced from their religious context and function and take their place exclusively within a secular human history. Is it necessary to make these kinds of separations? When members of the London Maori community came to bless the installation in the museum of Maori objects, some of them given by their ancestors to Captain Cook, speeches, songs and prayers acknowledged different kinds of relationships - spiritual and academic - with the objects on display. It was an affirmation of an important principle: secular inquiry need not preclude the rights of the sacred. Accommodations like this are perhaps harder when an object is tied to a particular notion of national identity, or comes to be appropriated to a particular political end. Such was the fate of the famous Cyrus Cylinder. Found in Babylon, this celebrates the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, king of Persia, in 539 BC. It is, in other words, the record of the morning after the night of Belshazzar's feast. The writing was on the wall, Babylon fell, the Persians arrived, and Cyrus inscribed this clay cylinder to be used as the foundation document of a temple. In it he proclaims that he has returned statues of gods to their temples, and allowed deported peoples to return to their homelands. It is the archeological evidence supporting the Old Testament narrative that Cyrus allowed the Jews to return from the waters of Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem. When the last Shah of Iran decided to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian monarchy, he asserted that the Cyrus Cylinder was the world's first charter of human rights, whose birthplace was therefore to be located in Iran - an assertion that must have startled many who had tried to assert their human rights under his regime. The Cylinder became a mantra of his newly constructed national identity. Comparison by scholars in the British Museum with other similar texts, however, showed that rulers in ancient Iraq had been making comparable declarations upon succeeding to the throne for two millennia before Cyrus. The Cylinder may indeed be a document of human rights and it is clearly linked with the history of Iran, but it is in no real sense an Iranian document: it is part of a much larger history of the ancient Near East, of Mesopotamian kingship, and of the Jewish diaspora. It is one of the museum's tasks to resist the narrowing of the object's meaning and its appropriation to one political agenda. Which brings us to the Elgin Marbles. After the fall of the Colonels in 1974, strengthening democracy and joining the EU were naturally the prime aims of the new Greek government. Then for the first time the location of the Parthenon sculptures became not merely a matter of cultural debate, but an instrument of national politics. Ever since, the return of the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum (about half of what survives from antiquity is already in Athens) has been a matter of Greek government policy. Melina Mercouri, Greek minister of culture, argued that the Parthenon and its sculptures embodied the values of democracy and indeed the very spirit of Greece as a modern, democratic, European nation, and were therefore the exclusive cultural patrimony of the Greek people. Well, up to a point. The problem is that they embody many other things besides. Their key purpose, as ornaments in a temple, was clearly as adjuncts to a religious cult. Athens may have been in some sense a democracy but it was also a slave-owning society and an imperial maritime power. Both the building and its sculptures were the subject of intense political controversy at the time of their creation, since they were funded from the proceeds of tribute extracted from fellow Greek city states in the name of defence against the Persian enemy. What becomes evident in Bloomsbury is that the sculptures are, like the Cyrus Cylinder, part of a story that is not only national. Indeed it is not only European. In artistic terms the sculptures are clearly part of a process that embraces Egypt and Mesopotamia, Turkey, India, Rome and the whole of Europe. Over the centuries, the Parthenon itself has, like its sculptures, come to mean many other and contradictory things. The building has been a church and a mosque and is now a ruin, - a document of the Christian, Ottoman and Venetian history of Greece as well as the Classical. Its present expurgated state is a testament to the classical education and aspirations of the German kings who shaped modern Greece in the mid 19th century. And the sculptures, since coming to London, have become part of another European and world story. The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose, to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty. We see, for example, brutally oversimplified notions of identity manufactured and imposed upon cultures and communities throughout the Middle East, to sustain entrenched conflicts. It is no less an issue for our own country, where many English view the European continent in general, and Germany in particular, through a distorting myth of inherited enmity, while Scots can look upon the English through the fictional history of opposition and oppression served up by Braveheart . We need not dwell on the mythical Britain, racially pure, of BNP fantasy. The cultural historian, Edward Said, in May 2003, after the invasion of Iraq and just a few months before his death, wrote a new preface to his book Orientalism : "The terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like America, the West, or Islam, and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, must be opposed ..." He goes on to say how we can oppose them. "We still have at our disposal the rational interpretative skills that are the legacy of humanist education. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other and live together, but for that kind of wider perception, we need time and a patient and sceptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation, that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction." The British Museum, any world museum, seems to me to be indeed one of Said's "communities of interpretation". A collection like that held in trust for the world by the British Museum is surely a powerful weapon in a conflict that may yet be mortal, unless we find means to free minds as well as bodies from oppression. World museums of this kind offer us a chance to forge the arguments that can hope to defeat the simplifying brutalities which disfigure politics all round the world. The British Museum must now reaffirm its worldwide civic purpose. That must be the goal that shapes our future plans. Where else can the world see so clearly that it is one? · Neil MacGregor is director of the British Museum.
odio le SUV...e in particolare i loro proprietari! (genere cagoni)
giovedì, luglio 22, 2004
STILL LIFE: tutto quello che, pur in trasformazione, ha cessato di avere vita propria!
il problema era espellerli rapidamente e con fermezza...forse se fossero stati cani abbandonati ci sarebbe stato più cuore e mobilitazione!!
mercoledì, luglio 21, 2004
L'ultima mossa di Bobby Fischer - Il campione in attesa di estradizione da Tokyo agli Usa chiede asilo a qualche «paese amico» - IGOR FIATTI - Altra mossa a sorpresa dell'ex campione di scacchi americano Bobby Fischer. Arrestato la settimana scorsa dalle autorità giapponesi all'aeroporto Narita di Tokio per il possesso di un passaporto non valido, e ricercato dagli Usa per aver violato nel 1992 le sanzioni internazionali contro la Jugoslavia accettando di disputare nel paese sotto embargo la rivincita del suo storico match del 1972 contro il sovietico Boris Spassky, Fischer ha chiesto asilo politico in un paese terzo per evitare l'estradizione negli Usa. «Bobby Fischer non vuole rimanere in Giappone, dominato dall'America, corrotto, brutale e ostile», ha detto la presidente della federazione giapponese di scacchi, Myoko Watai, amica dello scacchista che vinse la «battaglia del secolo», come fu allora battezzata la partita metafora della guerra fredda tra Mosca e Washington. «Né tanto meno tornare negli Stati Uniti, dove lo aspetta una corte speciale, dieci anni di prigione e forse anche una morte prematura», ha aggiunto la Watai. 32 anni fa, la partita che metteva in palio il titolo di campione mondiale di scacchi tra il genio eccentrico americano, Bobby Fischer, e il detentore, il sovietico Boris Spassky catturò l'attenzione del pianeta. La sfida fu giocata nella capitale islandese Reykyavik, a metà strada tra le due superpotenze. Il match del secolo rimase in forse fino all'ultimo: l'incontro si svolse solo dopo che furono accettate tutte le pretese dello sfidante; Fischer chiese e ottenne una borsa di 138 mila dollari e si arrivò alla scelta dell'Islanda solo dopo che l'americano fece fallire i grandi sforzi e sacrifici affrontati dalla federazione scacchistica jugoslava, che aveva preparato una organizzazione grandiosa. Appena arrivato offese gli islandesi, definendo l'Islanda inadeguata per l'evento perché non aveva un bowling. Poi si lamentò di tutto: delle telecamere, delle luci, del tavolo, delle sedie. Fischer, definito dalla stampa squilibrato e paranoico, accettò di giocare solo dopo che un miliardario inglese raddoppiò il premio partita, portandolo a 250 mila dollari. Dopo la vittoria, il ragazzo di Brooklyn avrebbe dovuto sfidare il sovietico Anatolij Karpov nel 1975, ma impose per il match regole così bizzarre che l'associazione scacchistica internazionale lo privò del titolo, assegnandolo d'ufficio al sovietico. Poi Fischer scomparve sino alla rivincita della «battaglia del secolo» organizzata in Jugoslavia nel 1992. Prima di giocare nella città montenegrina di Sveti Stefan, Fischer ricevette una lettera del dipartimento del tesoro Usa che gli intimava di rinunciare al match. Il campione sputò sulla lettera durante una memorabile conferenza stampa. Giocò e vinse di nuovo, diventando un ricercato. Poi il fece perdere le sue tracce in Asia, tra Giappone e Filippine. Negli ultimi anni spediva fax dalla sede della federazione di scacchi giapponese e interveniva sulle frequenze di una radio filippina, Radio Bombo, con discorsi antisemiti e antiamericani. Le autorità giapponesi lo hanno arrestato all'aeroporto di Tokio mentre stava partendo per le Filippine, che intanto gli avevano revocato il passaporto. Adesso, il campione aspetta l'eventuale estradizione negli Usa in una cella giapponese; ma per ribaltare la partita ha ancora una mossa a disposizione, l'accoglimento della domanda di asilo da parte di qualche «paese amico». (dal manifesto di oggi)
Calderoli ministro: un'altra botta d'intelligenza al servizio della Nazione!
martedì, luglio 20, 2004
The pop artist who ate himself Once he found poetry in flags, letters and numbers. Now Jasper Johns has turned his unflinching gaze inwards, writes Adrian Searle - Tuesday July 20, 2004 - The Guardian - What artists do is their business - they go their own way. Whether we wish to or are capable of following them is something else. Who could not admire Jasper Johns's early, iconic flags, targets, letters or number paintings, or fail to be seduced by his consumate drawing and painting skills? Who could not admire his poetic voice, in which the paint itself has a kind of plain-spoken immediacy, while his imagery gets ever stranger and stranger? Past Things and Present, covering the past 20 years of Johns's work, opened at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh a week ago, travelling from the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. It's a hall of mirrors in there, filled with reversals, inversions, duplications and deja vu. At some point, one is overtaken either by Johns or by ennui. One wants neither to be servile nor crudely antagonistic. Johns might have initially looked like a pop artist, but there was always something deeper going on. And if, over the past half-century, Johns has deepened what was already a pretty complex painting game, he has also mystified us. If, at the end, he is painting anything, it is the process of the mind at work, filled with stray thoughts, its affinities and enthusiasms. A mind led by curiosity, and haunted by its own past, from which it cannot extricate itself. Since the travelling retrospective that came to London's Hayward gallery in 1977, the last significant show of Johns in Britain was the wonderful and memorable Dancers on a Plane, at the capital's Anthony D'Offay gallery in 1989, which examined the collaborative friendship between Johns, composer John Cage and dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham. The second half of Johns's career has received relatively little serious attention here. His 1996 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York did not travel. Visiting that show, I felt, towards the end, that I, rather than Johns, had lost my way, and that he had somehow gone into a zone of magnificent obscurity. I'd grab at fragments rather than entire works - a beautiful rendition of a spattery spiral galaxy, or trompe l'oeil nails pinning painted papers to a wall; a small seahorse floating in a painting called Summer, and atavistic, dancing and brush-wielding stick men wandering through his layered images. But there was much that resisted interpretation. This isn't a bad thing, and contrary to what art historians might think, art isn't just to be read like a painted document, with painted footnotes. I got used to the difficulty and awkwardness of late Johns. His work doesn't ask for understanding any more than it asks for sympathy. Where early Johns was impassive, impersonal and deadpan, late Johns is, frankly, peculiar, and often extremely personal, in both his painted renderings and printed reproductions of old family photographic portraits, the remembered groundplans of his grandfather's house (where he lived for a period as a child), the view from his own bathtub, where favourite works are taped above the taps (to make the conservators scream, if this really was the case). The bath is a place to think and remember, much like the studio, where, if you are lucky, you might also disappear. Fragments of art-historical borrowings and tracings - which range from Grünewald's 1505 Isenheim Altarpiece (which the artist has visited several times), Hans Holbein's 1541 Portrait of a Young Nobleman holding a Lemur, to Da Vinci, Picasso, Munch, and from his own earlier work - make constant reappearances. One can and possibly must go on: elements derived from favourite ceramics by George Ohr, and from a commemorative 1977 Silver Jubilee gewgaw featuring the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, and a drawing by an anonymous schizophrenic female child reproduced in a 1952 Scientific American article by child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. The image Bettelheim reproduced, and that Johns has copied and worked from, shows two misaligned eyes, a mouth that might be smiling, two breasts below, all set within a hand-drawn border decorated with the child's smudgy fingerprints. As Bettelheim wrote, "children such as this create images, but they are not creative; they create fantastically interesting pictures, but they are not art". This sad drawing became important, and he has copied and reworked its elements in several ways. Most importantly, he set big, looming, cartoonish eyes at the corners and edges of his own works, a wandering curlicue of nostrils and nose-tip, a displaced mouth. It is a face without boundaries, an unreadable expression. There is something terrible in all this, but terrible in an unknowable way. Johns has also been reworking a Picasso head, taken from Woman with a Straw Hat, from 1936, in which Picasso turns the head into a kind of foetal sexualised blob: a cheek becomes a breast, the eye a nipple, the mouth a vagina. Sometimes Johns repaints it on a Veronica's Veil or a facecloth; at others it floats in an amniotic field of red, or is partially melted, Johns reheating his wax paint to make the image slump and run. Bettelheim warned against psychoanalytic interpretations of art, and against art as being intrinsically therapeutic. The urge to analyse Johns through his art needs to be resisted. In any case, I believe that he has lain plenty of traps for those who would attempt to do so. Maybe what Johns wants is to confound us. There is a certain recurring motif, an outline of an indecipherable shape, whose origin Johns refuses to reveal at all, and which makes its first appearance in a 1990 painting called Green Angel. The shape could be the map of an unknown country, a tracing drawn over several connected forms, a detail fragment. Breastplate? Draped corpse? Sleeping dog? Only Johns knows. Disentangling all this is a task that many scholars and writers have struggled with. Recent essays on Johns are almost as difficult as the works and working processes they attempt to describe. The initial difficulty is Johns's own: he has devoted much of his time to printmaking - in particular lithography - and his graphic skills are unquestionable. But spend as long printmaking as Johns and the paintings are likely to become layered and graphic too, sometimes to their detriment. Johns uses printmaking as a kind of thought process, reworking images, going back over them, conflating them, drawing out details and suppressing others. The prints are the first place to look for ruminations on his own artistic career, his motifs and subjects, and, it seems, he's never done with them. Yet I dislike looking at so many prints, under gloomy conservation light levels. There are fewer paintings in Edinburgh than one might hope. Johns's early art was reserved and laconic, like the public persona of the artist himself, who rarely smiled for the camera and reminded people of Buster Keaton. He also froze the brushstroke, turning the drip and the slash into something arrested and impassive. Johns's waxen drips don't run far, and his brush seems to get stuck as it paints, as the heated medium cools. Like the poets of his generation (Frank O'Hara or John Ashbery), his language was self-consciously formed. From the beginning, Johns was a stylist. He also had an eye for the impersonal. Yet the personal has a way of creeping in. If oil paint was invented to depict human flesh, encaustic might have been invented to depict the dead. Wax is also used to embalm, and to create the deathly, static likenesses in wax museums. Johns, prefiguring Bruce Nauman and Robert Gober, has often made use of fragmentary wax body casts, as if to show us a body really was once here. Like the photographer Lartigue, he has also become interested in depicting his shadow, as though it were proof of his existence. Paint, too, solidifies the passing moment. In 1964 Johns visited Windsor castle to see Leonardo da Vinci's Deluge drawings. "Here was a man depicting the end of the world," Johns wrote, "and his hand was not trembling." I feel much the same about Johns himself, not depicting the end of the world, more his age and the attic of his brain. He doesn't flinch. In some recent works, he has been using the catenary curve, the arc a length of string makes when its ends are suspended (and which is used in the design and structure of suspension bridges). Even a tightrope bellies between its ends. How to read this linear, drooping curve in Johns? Sagging tightrope, profile of a breast, a given physical property of the world? Perhaps all these things. Perhaps none. · Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns Since 1983 is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh EH4, till September 19. Details: 0131-332 2266.
lunedì, luglio 19, 2004
Casini ha detto che in Parlamento mancherà l'intelligenza di Bossi-Casini ha detto che in Parlamento mancherà l'intelligenza di Bossi-Casini ha detto che in Parlamento mancherà l'intelligenza di Bossi-Casini ha detto che in Parlamento mancherà l'intelligenza di Bossi-Casini ha detto che in Parlamento mancherà l'intelligenza di Bossi...non riesco a capire questo epitaffio!
"Giunge come una benedizione, la bella stagione. La più grande maggioranza parlamentare della storia repubblicana, sembra un governo balneare degli anni Settanta, con quello stile dimesso, un po' vintage, di basso profilo: dovrebbero fare i telegiornali in bianco e nero, renderebbe l'idea. Ora basta, tutti in vacanza. Gli italiani avranno molto da fare, tipo portare i vecchietti al fresco nei supermercati come consiglia il ministro Sirchia. Saremo allietati dall'eco mediatica delle notti al Billionaire e da tutto quell'ottundente e rassicurante cretinismo estivo che ci becchiamo ogni anno, comprese le vacanze dei vip, perché nulla ci verrà risparmiato. Aspettiamo con pazienza i bimbi azzannati dai pit-bull, i bagnanti sgozzati dalle moto d'acqua e gli incendi dolosi sulle coste e nei parchi naturali. Tutto come al solito, tutto sotto controllo, la solita vita, con l'unica grazia di fare a meno per qualche settimana delle dichiarazioni di Giovanardi e dei sibilanti penultimatum di Gianfranco Fini. Poi, a settembre - tornati dal mare (chi può) e ritirato il nonno dal reparto surgelati - ci ritroveremo gli stessi tipi, nelle loro precarie condizioni psicofisiche, che vengono a chiederci sessantamila miliardi di lire per dare una scossa all'economia." Robecchi sul manifesto di ieri
770 € è lo stipendio di un eurodeputato ungherese, 12000€ quello di un nostro eletto, entrambi contano un voto nelle decisioni importanti...peccato che uno costi quanto una badante, l'altro come una puttana di lusso! tra questi due estremi sta l'unione europea!!
domenica, luglio 18, 2004
a rischio di essere noiosi e ripetitivi: http://www.carmillaonline.com/archives/2004/07/000888.html
pensieri di un grande scrittore...Kurt Vonnegut: http://www.carmillaonline.com/archives/2004/07/000889.html
"guardrail sfonda auto muore bimba di un anno"; sono preoccupato perché se misuriamo i Km di guardrail presenti solo in Italia siamo assediati da un esercito di serial killer; la proprietà transitiva di sentimenti e azioni agli oggetti inanimati, propinataci da decenni di pubblicità è ormai entrata nell'ordine naturale delle cose, dopo i platani che il sabato sera si divertono a fare lo sgambetto a poveri giovani sbronzi che vorrebbero tornare (molto velocemente) a casa, adesso ci si mettono anche i guardrail...a quando i newjersey?
sabato, luglio 17, 2004
se Dio esiste è malvagio! "«La certezza dell’infanzia, di essere dentro un disegno, di essere stati pensati e amati da Dio, mi ha accompagnato. Ho visto l’intervento del Signore. Qualcuno ti guida, sei aspettato. Io studiavo in seminario e pensavo: mi preparo per gente che è ancora "in mente dei", ed era vero. Meraviglioso incrociarsi di destini. Ho imparato che ogni avversità è per un bene. Anche il secolo appena cominciato è un momento decisivo della storia, ma carico di possibilità positive» «Il mio ottimismo» Ersilio Tonini compie 90 anni:«Essere cristiani è gratitudine» «La sfida del terrorismo internazionale, che pare apocalittica, contiene invece, io credo, l’opportunità di riunificare gli uomini contro questo terribile nemico: un effetto risanante. Anche l’Europa è riuscita a rinascere dopo i lager nazisti» «La globalizzazione, che spaventa l’Occidente, cos’è se non l’emergere sul mercato di immensi Paesi poverissimi? La ricerca scientifica è la vera sfida, poiché la posta in gioco è l’uomo stesso, ma il pensieri riprenderà il suo primato»"
venerdì, luglio 16, 2004
ma perché inciampare nell'italiano chiamandoli Centri d'Accoglienza quando sono Luoghi di Detenzione Preventiva? poi la gente tenta la fuga, ma forse lo fa perché non sopporta di essere accolta con il filo spinato!
Arrestato Bobby Fischer, l'ex mito degli scacchi. Si è conclusa in Giappone la caccia a Bobby Fischer, 61 anni, ex leggendario campione di scacchi americano. Le autorità giapponesi lo hanno bloccato all'aeroporto di Narita, a Tokyo, su richiesta del governo statunitense. L'uomo è accusato di aver violato un divieto statunitense andando in Jugoslavia nel 1992 per disputare una partita di scacchi contro Boris Spassky. Catturato dopo una caccia che ha interessato vari paesi, Fischer rischia un massimo di dieci anni di prigione. (Ex-Chess Champion Bobby Fischer Detained Fugitive Held in Japan on Charges Stemming From '92 Spassky Match in Yugoslavia - By Allan Lengel - Washington Post Staff Writer - Friday, July 16, 2004 - The hunt for Bobby Fischer, the unpredictable chess legend, ended this week when he was detained in Japan, where he awaits possible deportation on charges that he attended a 1992 match in Yugoslavia in violation of a U.S. ban. The Japanese Immigration Bureau detained the 61-year-old Fischer on Tuesday at Narita International Airport in Tokyo at the urging of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which had recently stepped up efforts to track the fugitive, U.S. authorities said yesterday. "He's in custody in Japan, and we are awaiting a determination whether he'll be deported back to the United States to face charges," said Allan Doody, special agent in charge of the immigration agency's Washington field office. The arrest capped a cat-and-mouse game between U.S. authorities and Fischer, who shuttled among several nations, including Japan, the Philippines and Hungary, to avoid arrest. A grand jury in Washington charged him with violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act by going to Yugoslavia for the chess match against Boris Spassky. The charge, handed up in 1992, carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. U.S. authorities, acting on the outstanding warrant, recently canceled Fischer's U.S. passport after discovering that he had a 90-day visa to visit Japan. Authorities there detained him at the airport for failing to possess valid travel documents, U.S. authorities said. In August 1992, the Treasury Department sent Fischer a letter warning him not to go to Yugoslavia to play Spassky for the world class chess match. It explained that U.S. citizens were forbidden to get involved in "business or commercial activities" with Yugoslavia because of its role in Bosnia and Herzegovina. "We consider your presence in Yugoslavia for this purpose to be an exportation of services to Yugoslavia in the sense that the Yugoslav sponsor is benefiting from the use of your name and reputation," the letter said. Fischer ignored the letter and headed off to Yugoslavia to square off against Spassky. Fischer had surrendered the world championship in 1975 after he refused to defend it against Anatoly Karpov of Russia. At a news conference in Yugoslavia in September 1992, Fischer held up the letter and spit on it. He went on to beat Spassky and receive $3.3 million. In subsequent interviews overseas, Fischer said he no longer played the "old chess." In 1996, he launched his own form of chess, Fischerandom Chess, in which the major pieces are arranged on a traditional board in an unorthodox way. Fischer, whose mother is Jewish, became well known for his ranting and raving and anti-Semitic remarks. In a radio interview May 24, 1999, in Baguio, the Philippines, Fischer remarked: "America is totally under control of the Jews, you know. I mean, look what they're doing now in Yugoslavia. . . . The secretary of state and the secretary of defense are, are dirty Jews." After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Fischer remarked on Philippine radio: "This is all wonderful news. It's time . . . to finish off the U.S. once and for all. . . . This just shows what comes around, goes around." )
che sollievo sapere che un ministro in riposo forzato (ma la clinica svizzera la stiamo pagando noi?) vigila sul governo e sui suoi malanni e telefona a Silvio e con voce roca e spettrale gli intima la via che il NORD esige...(speriamo non gli abbiano detto della sua leggiucchia bocciata, potrebbe aggravarsi!)
giovedì, luglio 15, 2004
da recuperare nelle rassegne estive: A SNAKE OF JUNE di Shinya Tsukamoto, torbido e claustrofobico nippodramma in un luminoso bianco e nero...OzuTremila!
Record £2.6m for Roman glass lamp - Colin Blackstock - Thursday July 15, 2004 - The Guardian - A Roman glass bowl, almost intact after 1,700 years, set a record for the most expensive ancient glass sold at auction - for the third time. The Constable-Maxwell cage-cup, in fact an oil lamp, sold at Bonhams to a phone bidder for £2,646,650. In 1979, collector Andrew Constable-Maxwell sold it for a then record £520,000. Seven years later the British Rail pension fund sold it for £2.1m. Joanna van der Lande, head of antiquities at Bonhams, said the third-century glass bowl came from the eastern Mediterranean, and was probably a grave object. "It's exceptionally fragile, cut from a single block of glass. It would have been clear but has become iridescent due to a reaction between the earth [it was buried in] and the glass. Its probable use was as an oil lamp suspended by a collar around the rim. "It's really a very highly prized piece."
mercoledì, luglio 14, 2004
farei un'indagine per capire come mai i generali non muoiono mai di malattie legate all'uranio impoverito, forse è una loro predisposizione congenita, o più semplicemente alla merda non si attacca! (in memoria di Luca Sepe e ai suoi 28 anni persi)
per chi va in Francia in questo periodo, e fino a settembre c'è ad Arles il Festival della Fotografia...http://www.rip-arles.org/
ATENE - Jannis Kounellis - L'artista greco si afferma negli anni Sessanta come uno dei protagonisti dell'arte povera: le sue installazioni e costruzioni a parete fatte con ferro, carbone, fuoco, legno e pietra sottolineano la natura primordiale delle cose. Nella personale si possono ammirare opere di diversi periodi. MUSEO NAZIONALE DI ARTE CONTEMPORANEA, Vass Sofiaa and Kokkali (Info: 00302109242111) dal 14 luglio al 31 dicembre
martedì, luglio 13, 2004
sul manifesto di oggi...panorami prossimi venturi dei rapporti USA-CINA - La strategia della tensione futura è stata già tutta scritta da Washington - JOSEPH HALEVI - Aumentare la tensione militare con la Cina e mantenere questo paese unicamente come base di produzione a basso costo di prodotti venduti dalle stesse multinazionali Usa è stata una componente principale della politica estera di Washington dalla crisi economica asiatica in poi. E' in questa chiave che vanno lette le crisi aperte nei confronti della Corea del Nord, la prima ancora durante la presidenza Clinton. Sul finire della sua presidenza fu rilanciato il programma delle guerre stellari trasformato poi in uno schema apertamente anticinese dal duo Bush-Cheney. Il progetto prevede l'inclusione nel dispositivo missilistico di gran parte dell'Asia sudorientale. In questi giorni è stata firmata a Washington la partecipazione australiana, benché lo stesso ministro della difesa di Canberra abbia ammesso che sull'Australia non gravi alcuna minaccia. Potrà però, ha aggiunto, gravare nel futuro, ed è vero se Canberra si schiera sempre automaticamente dalla parte degli Usa, come fu nel caso del Vietnam ed ora dell'Iraq. La traiettoria della futura tensione tra gli Usa e la Cina è visibile nel rapporto della «U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission» presentato al Congresso alcune settimane fa. Il documento di 300 pagine si concentra sulle implicazioni strategiche della crescita economica cinese.(http://www.uscc.gov/researchreports/2004/04annual_report.PDF). La Commissione sottolinea che «alcune delle attuali tendenze nelle relazioni tra gli Usa e la Cina hanno, per il lungo periodo, delle implicazioni negative per l'economia e la sicurezza nazionale». La principale tendenza negativa è individuata nel deficit commerciale in quanto «(i) ha contribuito all'erosione dell'occupazione manifatturiera e alla ripresa senza occupazione degli Stati Uniti, (ii) il settore manifatturiero ha un ruolo cruciale per la sicurezza economica e nazionale del paese». Alle società Usa non viene attribuita alcuna responsabilità del drastico declino industriale, la colpa è unicamente del comportamento cinese. Ne consegue, come esplicitamente afferma il rapporto, che i flussi degli investimenti Usa verso la Cina devono essere valutati secondo l'ottica della sicurezza nazionale. La Commissione fa dipendere il progredire della globalizzazione a livello mondiale dallo stato dei rapporti tra Washington e Pechino. In questo contesto la Cina è accusata di manipolare il tasso di cambio dello yuan, di intervenire nei mercati di capitale, di proteggere settori chiave come quello dei semiconduttori, nonché di attirare, attraverso il listing di compagnie statali sulle piazze internazionali, capitali esteri che potrebbero finire, a loro insaputa, nel complesso militar-industriale di Pechino. La Commissione si sofferma a lungo su due punti di particolare interesse: le esigenze energetiche della Cina e le politiche di sviluppo tecnologico. Riguardo il primo aspetto, non è solo la trasformazione della Cina in secondo importatore di petrolio a preoccupare gli Usa. In defintiva, come ha lasciato intendere nel 1998 nella sua deposizione al Congresso John Maresca della Unocal, le società Usa devono sfruttare tutti i possibili benefici derivanti dall'aumento della domanda energetica cinese. Per questo Maresca sollecitava una rapida apertura dell'Afghanistan. Il punto dolens per la Commissione è il fatto che la Cina intenda di sviluppare autonomamente relazioni con paesi produttori. Infatti «la Cina cerca di assicurarsi rifornimenti energetici, specialmente nuove fonti di gas e petrolio, che non siano soggetti a potenziali perturbazioni in tempo di conflitto». La Cina ha ricercato la cooperazione energetica con paesi che preoccupano gli Stati Uniti, inclusi l'Iran ed il Sudan, che sono inaccessibili alle compagnie Usa come ad altre compagnie occidentali. Dato che l'Iran non è proprio precluso agli interessi europei, il passo rivela l'atteggiamento antieuropeo di Washington che definisce come occidentale solo il campo degli interessi delle proprie multinazionali. In conclusione, la strategia di Pechino punta ad «accordi bilaterali che minano gli sforzi multilaterali volti a stabilizzare i rifornimenti ed i prezzi del petrolio e che in alcuni casi possono comportare pericolosi trasferimenti di armamenti (cinesi, n.d.r)». Nel campo della tecnologia «ciò che la Cina fa con le sue crescenti capacità - se le converte ad usi militari oppure al controllo del libero flusso di informazioni alla propria popolazione - è materia di diretta preoccupazione per la sicurezza nazionale degli Stati uniti. Inoltre è di vitale importanza per la sicurezza economica degli Usa la misura nella quale tali progressi permettono alla Cina di sfidare la competitività Usa nello sviluppo tecnologico». L'intero documento si basa sulla connessione tra statualità e globalizzazione ove quest'ultima deve essere controllata da una stato solo: gli Usa.
in effetti ora che si è accertato che non si tratta di sudanesi ma generici neri tutto si fa più complicato...
uno dei migliori dell'ultima biennale colpisce ancora...Buried alive - Santiago Sierra took 10 Iraqis, covered them in insulating foam, then waited for it to harden. Adrian Searle reports - Tuesday July 13, 2004 - The Guardian - It is impossible to tell if they are men or women, as they stand in line facing the wall, their heads cowled in black plastic sheeting that drapes their backs. A taller man in white protective clothing goes down the line, positioning them, a breathing mask slung about his neck. When he touches them he does so lightly, deferentially, but with a certain firmness. There is an air of deep unease. When the hooded figures are as he wants them, he picks up something like a gun, with a long snaking tube leading to an industrial canister on the floor. He begins spraying. The video is silent, shot in black and white. The stuff coming out of the spraygun solidifies into a porridgy bile as it builds up on the backs of the people lined against the wall, forming a light-coloured cindery mound over their cowls, down their backs, to the floor. It is as though they are being buried alive in a rough wall of polyurethane foam. When he's done, the figures stand immobilised. The camera lingers. It is a relief when, one by one, they begin moving again, climbing from the solidified gunge. As they turn and edge their way out, between this clinkered wall and the grey wall behind them, their faces remain hidden behind white hoods and clear plastic visors. They too are wearing chemical protection suits. They are Iraqis. Inevitably, you think of torture, those terrible dehumanised and degrading images from Abu Ghraib jail, and the shackled, manacled prisoners shuffling and humiliated at Guantanamo. People treated as objects. A guy in a suit walks the line. Dick Cheney on an unannounced visit? No - it's Nicholas Logsdail, director of the Lisson Gallery, wandering through. The gallery assistant with the gun reaches for a fresh canister. People are singled out or made to stand in groups of twos and threes. One stands alone, two together, the black polythene draping their hooded heads and white-suited shoulders. They make you think of monks, of women wearing the burka and the chador. The suits remind us of chemical attacks and of squads cleaning beaches after oil spills. Chilling though all this is, there is a choreography to it. The nervousness of the participants gives way to an apparent enthusiasm and complicity. Is this the "Stockholm effect", in which the kidnapped take the side of their oppressors? Or a more everyday sense that what they are being paid to do might be worthwhile or interesting? This is art, after all. I am filled with an enormous hesitation, which may be part of the point. "Ten Iraqi immigrant workers were hired for this action. They were provided with protective chemical clothing and with thick industrial plastic sheeting. Afterwards they were placed in order in different positions and sprayed on their backs with polyurethane until the material accumulated into large free-standing forms. All the elements used in this action have been left abandoned in the space." So runs Spanish artist Santiago Sierra's brief explanation of his latest work, Polyurethane Sprayed on the Backs of Ten Workers, Lisson Gallery, London, UK, July 2004. Mexico-based Sierra's works are always titled and described in the flattest of tones, as though they were the most normal occurrences. In the past, he has paid heroin-addicted prostitutes in their drug of choice, after they agreed to have lines tattooed on their backs. He has paid a homeless person "to clean visitors' shoes without their consent during an opening". He has paid men in Havana to masturbate in front of a video camera. Illegal street vendors in Venice were given $60 to have their hair bleached, while migrant workers from Africa were hidden in the hold of a ship off Barcelona. He stipulated that their papers had to be in order, and they be given food and water. The artist's work courts shock and risks accusations of coercion and manipulation. It has attracted the attention of the police and criminal gangs, as well as presenting difficulties for galleries and politicians around the world. Sierra goes out of his way to make life difficult - or is it to show how difficult life already is? His titles remind us of minimal sculptures of the 1960s and 1970s in their pared-down spareness, their listing of materials and volumes. This is deliberate. For minimalism read materials; for materials read evidence; for action read exploitation; for conditions read economic and cultural conditions; for site-specificity read society; for all of it read capital ism. Such are the terms of the minimalist language and approach Sierra has used since 1990. In a rather literal sense, his work complies with the development of sculpture as prescribed in Rosalind Krauss's essay Sculpture in an Expanded Field. What of the Iraqi immigrants? What does this work tell us of their conditions, and what does their collaboration signify? As for the "freestanding forms", are they statues, or a trace left by these Iraqis who, once they have removed their protective clothing and been paid off, disappear back into the streets, thank you very much, to an exile that, for most of us, is marked by its invisibility? Perhaps we fear them as much as fear for them. Perhaps some of us resent them. Sierra's work is in part a dramatised comment about the obscurity in which they live. The seven women and three men were recruited from west London's Iraqi community, Sierra explaining that they would be participating in a film and a sculpture. It is my understanding that during their participation they began to see the implications of their collaboration, the wealth of associations it bought up. Even the polyurethane insulating foam blasting from the spray gun has its associations. It insulates and isolates. We can see it, metaphorically, as sperm (Sierra has also sprayed the stuff over Italian prostitutes), as a jet of formless fecal matter, as a substitute for paint, as something that turns to stone. The pale yellowish mounds in the gallery also reminded me of that empty American snack, popcorn. Emptiness is at the heart of it. The gallery looks like someone's studio, abandoned in the middle of things, with boxes of materials and grubby heaps of protective clothing, grey paper tacked to the floor and around the walls, and somewhere a neat pile of folded blankets. And then the globby walls of foam where figures once stood, huddling together and apart. In one room, behind the spattered accumulations and frozen slumps of material, the black plastic hoods still adhere to the polyurethane, witnessing nothing. There is something both touching and bleak about these lumps, recalling Giacometti's plaster figures arising from their formlessness, as if eroded by the space about them. A shadow on a wall in Hiroshima, where someone was vaporised, leaving an almost photographic smudge; the people and dogs of Pompeii, who left behind an empty cast of themselves in the lava. Here 10 individuals stood, angled across a corner; here ones and twos and threes at right angles to the walls; there four in line, evenly spaced. This is not so much a state of incompletion as of suspension, which is like both my hesitation about Sierra's work, and his feeling that there's nothing wrong with sharing his complexes with the public. He said, in an interview last week with Cuauhtémoc Medina, that "there is a certain chain of images which agglutinate disasters fresh in our memory". Sierra's work makes some people very angry. It is easy to see it in terms of exploitation - of the homeless, destitutes, prostitutes, hustlers, heroin addicts, street hawkers, proselytising Christians and others he has hired to perform his actions around the world. Would they volunteer to do so again? Would they have done it in the first place, had their plight not been so desperate? That, he'd say, is the point. One wins more friends by lambasting Sierra than by defending him. We might ask instead what his work does. It makes us think about labour and value, about what culture can do or say, and the exclusivity of the international art world, and about the emptiness of our social contracts. There is a poetics as well as a politics to Sierra's work, and a deft reworking of the dominant artistic language of the past 40 years. In the end, we must attend to what is there, to the painful evidence of the work, its impotence and emptiness and violence, and a kind of shame. · Santiago Sierra is at the Lisson Gallery, London NW1, until August 21. Details: 020-7724 2739.
è geniale l'idea di congelare le elezioni per timore di un'influenza del terrorismo sui risultati elettorali...il cerchio si chiude!
lunedì, luglio 12, 2004
cosa si può dire a quel giornalista che stasera in un servizio al TG2 ha dichiarato (non è la prima volta che sento questa stupidaggine) che il voto spagnolo del 13 marzo ha dato un risultato favorevole al terrorismo...che ha poco rispetto per milioni di spagnoli e per le loro maggioritarie opinioni!
questa sera altre contorsioni (governative) ma domani tornerà il sereno...
Look at me! - They're bold, sophisticated and impossible to ignore. But are 'landmark' buildings ruining our cities, asks Graham Morrison - Monday July 12, 2004 - The Guardian - Architecture has always had its icons. For centuries they took the form of churches and temples. In our secular age we still need familiar and reassuring reference points - but in the rush to fill this void, designers have been falling over themselves to apply the iconic treatment to every conceivable building. These new designs have names like Spiral, Cocoon, Cloud or Vortex, inspiring a sense of poetic wonder. Often, though, they are just ordinary buildings distorted into unnecessarily complicated shapes. Their main purpose is to attract our attention. The true architectural icon is a building that is unmistakable, often provocative, and carries cultural signals far beyond its purpose. Obvious iconic landmarks include the Sydney opera house, the Pompidou centre, even the new Scottish parliament building - all of which initially met with disapproval. These modern icons simultaneously signal their function and their public importance. They convey the spirit of their age; they are both useful and memorable. But there are also less significant buildings that aspire to iconic status but do not always deserve the profile their sponsors demand. In this context, the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao has had a significant effect. I am not convinced it is a great work of architecture, although its public credentials are clear. Its significance as a building is less in its extraordinary shape and surface (which many now consider formulaic) than in the popularity of its formal abstraction. This is an important building that gives little obvious indication of its content. While we are all now attuned to identifying such structures as cultural institutions, could this abstract formula be applied to more prosaic buildings - a hospital or a school perhaps? With Bilbao, "celebrity architecture", in all its low-cut and high-rise disguises, came of age. It was certain to be followed by a torrent of imitators - and indeed, the launch of the Guggenheim coincided with a new public appetite for bling-bling architecture. Lottery investment and the subsequent press interest provoked a demand for "finished" images. This has encouraged the presentation of a single uncomplicated idea, an architectural one-liner that once in the public realm would be difficult to change. As competition increases, each image has to be more extraordinary and shocking in order to eclipse the last. Each new design has to be instantly memorable - more iconic. This one-upmanship was, and is, a fatuous and self-indulgent game. You need only take a trip down the Thames from Southwark to Wandsworth to see the effects. On what I now call the Costa del Icon, you see an array of second-rate structures, all shrilly demanding attention, without any relationship to each other. Sophisticated computer imagery and carefully lit models mean the original plans are very seductive, but their concrete realisation often leaves us disappointed and suspicious. Not only that, but the impact of these celebrity misfits is diminished by their ubiquity. How many landmarks does one city need? Perhaps we should ask some simple questions before handing out more money and plaudits to "visionary" designers. What is the value of turning functional buildings into iconic ones? Are we simply trying too hard? Is a building's purpose compromised by its style? And what contribution does the icon make to its surroundings? Too many iconic buildings and the fabric of the city is distorted, but too few and the city is dull. It is the quiet strength of ordinary streets and unexceptional buildings that allows the icon to be special. We need to look at the city as a whole, and no building should leave it worse off. Although we talk of the "Bilbao effect" - how one remarkable building can change the way in which a city is perceived and boost its economy - there is little evidence to suggest that architecture in the form of a single gesture can really have such restorative powers. Without easyJet, it is far from certain that the small economic gains in Bilbao would be measurable at all. But now every failing town or institution is considering some sort of architectural makeover. A smart new building can have the opposite effect of showing up those areas that are struggling. At the London Metropolitan University, Daniel Libeskind has tried to work his magic on Holloway Road. The new graduate centre, called - typically - Orion, and formed from three intersecting shards of grey metal, is a further development of the crumpled thinking seen in his plans for the Victoria and Albert museum's Spiral extension. Despite the elaborate explanations of the concept on his website, the design is little more than a cultural placebo, a distraction from the university's long-term management issues that might do more harm than good. The office building, meanwhile, is the true chameleon of our time. We have seen it mutate from a Miesian ideal into a postmodern palace, into a hi-tech machine, into organic forms and now blobs dressed up as art (such as Will Alsop's Cloud in Liverpool). Strangely, for buildings intended to inspire efficiency, these cosmetic changes are rarely market- or customer-led. They are more often than not driven simply by the need to get planning approval. We saw this at London Bridge, where the planning inspector hailed Renzo Piano's assembly of glass shards as an artistic success. It has now, predictably, been followed by the proposal for Elizabeth House at Waterloo. This domineering, elephantine project is made entirely of glass and is claimed to reflect light in a way that is varied and beautiful. Enormous it is; beautiful it is not. Its formidable design team, which includes an artist, is at pains to persuade us that this is an object of cultural merit. But the designers were simply following the lead of some other, perhaps better regarded, icons where the building's exterior is similarly and abstractly packaged as art. So what are the iconic designs that get it right? Well, there are four that deserve to be mentioned and celebrated. Will Alsop's unusual plans for Goldsmiths college, which work well in the urban fabric of New Cross, south London. Richard Rogers's proposed tower in Leadenhall Street, the city of London - although taller than Swiss Re, it develops into a thin vertical wedge that brilliantly defers to St Paul's. The London Eye, whose sheer scale and directional quality make it a delightful addition to the city. And Herzog and de Meuron's recent prizewinning scheme for a new cultural centre in Jerez, the city of flamenco, which avoids the complicated and contorted geometries of their rivals. All these projects prove that it is possible to create buildings that are at once visually impressive, workable and in keeping with their surroundings without compromising architectural integrity. These are true icons. · This is an edited extract from Graham Morrison's speech to the Architects' Journal/Bovis Awards for Architecture dinner.
domenica, luglio 11, 2004
la notte dei lunghi coltelli! ma alla fine grandi pacche sulle spalle e il saccheggio prosegue...ad oltranza
c'è di che essere profondamente delusi dall'essere italiani o europei (visto che anche i tedeschi non stanno facendo un'ottima figura) nel respingere, con sospetti e paura 37 (trentasette) poveri disperati sudanesi in fuga da un paese martoriato da un decennale conflitto, i cavilli giuridici non reggono all'assurdità della situazione e alla sua inumanità!
sabato, luglio 10, 2004
sulla "scuola": http://www.carmillaonline.com/archives/2004/07/000870.html
Silvio dà una mano ad Ariel: ha tempo fino al 31 dicembre per condonare il muro!
Esistono tra le pieghe del potere alcune strutture che servono a dimostrare ai critici che la democrazia e la giustizia sono i principi fondanti del potere stesso e che dinanzi a questi altari ognuno è parimenti considerato...capita talvolta per disavventura che questo avvenga...ed è in quel momento, ascoltando le critiche, di chi forte si sente in diritto di imporre qualsiasi cosa, che la maschera cade e in tutta la sua ipocrisia possono ammirarsi i ghigni dei tutori dell'ordine mondiale...
venerdì, luglio 09, 2004
QUALSIASICOSADECIDESSIDISCRIVERESUQUESTOPEZZO DISTOFFASAREBBECONDIZIONATODALQUIEORADIMESCRIVENTE EDIOGNISMARRITOOSMALIZIATOSGUARDODITEVEDENTEDAUNA SCRITTURAFATTADISEGNICHIARIMAINDECIFRABILINELLORO DISAGGREGARSILASCIANDOSPAZIOPERALTRIPENSIERI poi le cose sono in parte cambiate ma il senso rimane invariato: una tinozza raccoglie le voci pensiero che libere scorrono...INPARTE...
giovedì, luglio 08, 2004
Azienda Speciale VILLA MANIN Centro d'Arte Contemporanea: forse un impegno superiore alle reali possibilità e risposte del territorio...una macchina mangia soldi che probabilmente sta solo usando la cultura come copertura...bella la mostra al pian terreno, LOVE/HATE da Magritte a Cattelan...insignificante la mostra dei giovani pittori italiani al piano superiore...divertente e ben inserita l'installazione sul fronte della villa delle fontane progettate da Jeppe Hein...il tempo darà ragione o torto alle perplessità
sara un vero Vermeer? Vermeer fetches £16.2m - Maev Kennedy - Thursday July 8, 2004 - The Guardian - A small picture of a pudgy-fingered young woman in a lumpily-painted yellow shawl sold for £16.2m at a Sotheby's auction last night, a record price for the artist - although since the last Vermeer to be auctioned was more than 80 years ago, and there is never likely to be another, a record was no surprise. The price, paid by an anonymous buyer, shot in minutes past the notably conservative estimate of £3m. Art experts have been arguing about the painting for a century, but recent cleaning and scientific analysis transformed the young woman's reputation: she is now generally accepted as only the 36th known painting by the 17th century Dutch painter, whose works are among the most coveted in the world. Although any Vermeer is a great discovery, the critical consensus is that this is a good but not a great Vermeer. The price was dwarfed by the world record for an old master painting, just under £50m paid at a London auction for Rubens's Massacre of the Innocents two years ago, and the £22m paid this year by the National Gallery for Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks, for which the Getty Museum in California originally offered over £30m. The last private sale of a Vermeer was 49 years ago, and the last auction 81 years ago when The Little Street failed to sell; it was later presented to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where it is one of the museum's most treasured possessions. Barring this painting resurfacing for sale there is never likely to be another Vermeer auction: all the rest are now in museum collections."
mercoledì, luglio 07, 2004
The player of games - Gabriel Orozco sculpts in lint, draws with toothpaste and fills his own socks with papier mache. Clever chap, says Adrian Searle Tuesday July 6, 2004 - The Guardian - Gabriel Orozco's Black Kites. Photo courtesy of the artist and the Marian Goodman Gallery Gabriel Orozco once spent six months drawing a checkerboard of black squares over a human skull. Using a graphite pencil, he drew over the cranium, into the eye sockets, around the cheekbones and across the jaw. As he slowly mapped his way over the skull, so the grid took account of the bulges, indentations, convexities and concavities. The black squares squeezed themselves into jazzy rhomboids, and became elongated diamond shapes, black against the brownish ivory bone. Only the teeth grinned back, untouched. The skull now sits on a plinth in Orozco's new show at London's Serpentine Gallery. The skull might remind us of the disturbing skeletal figures and masks in Mexico's Day of the Dead carnival, and of that crystal Aztec skull (which turned out to be a 19th-century fake) that sat for so long in London's Museum of Mankind. But this is to read too much into the fact that Orozco is Mexican. The skull is not meant for some grisly cabinet of curiosities. This is an immaculate hand-drawn grid, projected over the rounded surface of a skull that the critic Benjamin Buchloh describes as a ready-made. What could be more redolent of 20th-century art than the regularity of the grid, the black squares of Malevich, Marcel Duchamp's readymades? "One day in the near future," Duchamp once commented, "the whole galaxy of objects will become ready-mades." Can a human skull (or, by implication, a human being, alive or dead) really be seen as a readymade? One remembers instead that Du