Art

Arty stuff.

Chronicler of Russian life

Alexander Rodchenko, having achieved international acclaim as an avant-garde painter, sculptor and graphic designer, took up the cause of photography in 1924 with novel and thrilling results. His trademark shot was taken from high above or “bottom-up”, the lens tilted to create an angular, jarring effect. Whether focusing on the anonymous individual, the Soviet masses at work, or at play, or radical new forms of architecture, Rodchenko was able to reflect back his images in bold, memorable and often unusual, geometric perspectives. In a post-Tsarist society in which over 70% of the population...

Arts against cuts

The Arts Against Cuts collective is a group of students, lecturers, artists, cultural workers and those interested in creative resistance, organising in a non-hierarchical structure against both the cuts and the ever increasing use of the arts and culture as a tool of ideological and political control. Since being set up around three months ago a number of actions have been facilitated by the group, and we will continue to do that indefinitely. So far we have had a large number of very diverse participants and always welcome anyone to our open weekly meetings. There is no single person or...

Arts Against Cuts: "There is a long standing relationship between the aesthetic and emancipatory politics"

Louis Hartnoll, President of the University of the Arts London SU and an activist in Arts Against Cuts , spoke to Daniel Randall of Solidarity . What are the origins of the campaign? The collective are a group of students, lecturers, artists, cultural workers and those interested in creative resistance organising in a non-hierarchical structure against both the cuts and the ever increasing use of the arts and culture as a tool of ideological and political control. Since being set up around 3 months ago a number of direct action has been facilitated by the group and we will continue to do so...

Forum: Poll tax; Trotsky on Zionism; Hitler, Stalin, and art; and symposium on the nature of the Stalinist states

Click here to download pdf. Workers' Liberty 14 Forum section How not to fight the poll tax; Trotsky on Zionism; Hitler, Stalin, and art. A symposium on the nature of the Stalinist states: Martin Thomas; Stan Crooke; Duncan Chapple, Pete Keenlyside, and others; Sean Matgamna. The contributions on the nature of the Stalinist states from Martin Thomas and Sean Matgamna are below. The other items from this Forum are currently available only on pdf. "Deformed capitalist states" Martin Thomas The revolutions which created state-monopoly industrialism were all made in under-developed capitalist...

Art and the Russian revolution

Most interested Westerners hold the idea that art is 'free', a metter for the artist expressing him or herself without restrictions. The notion that art should be 'used' for ideological purposes is presented in the media as a perversion practised mainly by Stalinists. A five part article, written in 1966/7(and republished in 1989) focuses on the role of art in the Russian revolution and working-class culture. Click here to download the pdf

Build for battle in January

We were discussing taking some kind of radical direct action for a long time before we went into occupation. We had a democratic meeting on a Saturday, which involved a lot of different groups and forces. We discussed what kind of action we wanted to take and decided to go for an occupation. We thought about some demands we’d like to raise and used the Sunday to make flyers, make banners and build support amongst activists for the idea. On Monday we want into occupation. We chose this space because it’s visible. It’s near the student union, so a lot of students walk past it. Staff come into...

A memoir for a generation

This book is neither biography nor autobiography. It is not a book about Robert Mapplethorpe, it is not a book about Patti Smith. Unlike Suze Rotollo’s A Freewheelin’ Time: a memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties , it is not the chronicle of a specific time in a specific place. Instead, this is the transformation of Smith’s emotional experience of her relationship with visual artist Mapplethorpe into an object that communicates those emotions directly to the reader. Rather than having structured chapters, Just Kids moves in waves of mood, determined by the state of Smith’s relationship to...

Sex worker exhibition: what's shocking about this?

Created between 1983 and 1988, The Hoerengracht is a reproduction of Amsterdam’s red light district, a series of small buildings housing models of sex workers, framed by the familiar red neon lights. The viewer is invited to peer in through windows, taking on the role of voyeur. It’s a small installation, which takes maybe 15 minutes to get a reasonably detailed view of, and for an exhibition in a major gallery on the topic of sex work, it’s disappointing and devoid of content. Art does not, of course, have to be political; though any socialist feminist viewer may wish to see our politics of...

A permanent revolution for Ireland: a Provo-IRA socialist revolution? Part 2

...Continued... Mick: It's a central part of the ideology - in Karl Marx's sense of 'false consciousness' - of nationalist populism in Ireland that you conflate or collapse into each other the distinct questions of imperialism and anti-imperialism on the one side, and the intra-lrish conflict on the other. Most leftists in Britain, for example, talk and try to act as if only the question of British Imperialism exists in the Northern Ireland situation. The fact is that the intra-lrish conflict is massively the bigger question, and one could argue that imperialism exists, if at all, as a legacy...

Art and revolution

Sacha Ismail reviews the Tate Modern’s exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Liubov Popova and Aleksandr Rodchenko. “We must be consciously proud that we live in this great new epoch, the epoch of grand undertaking... We must break from the past because we do not believe in it any more, because its premises are not acceptable, and we will create the new ones.” Liubov Popova The Russian revolution did not just tranform political and economic relations. It penetrated all levels of society, including art and culture, producing a tremendous blossoming of visual art in particular. This...

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