15,000 women marched through New York City in 1908 demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights.

http://www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp

100 years on, the pertinence of this event is honored through IWD’s 2008 global theme ‘Shaping Progress’.

Around the world, websites link to this site. Add your own IWD events and news.
There are currently 612 IWD 2008 events listed from 52 different countries

PETER PAUL CHOCOLATES
Chocolate Santa is $100 plus Shipping and Handling.

Paul McCarthy, (born 1945, Salt Lake City, USA) began, in 1970, to record performances he did mostly at his studio on videotape.

«I think that in part my work refer to my own private, forgotten or repressed memories and that I seem to play them out unconciously in my actions … but I’m not sure how they relate to me. Are they specifically my traumas, or someone else’s that I have witnessed either directly or through the media?»

He started working with liquids early on: motor oil, ketchup.

«The bottle of mayonnaise within the action is no longer a bottle of mayonnaise; it is now a women’s genitals. Or it is now a phallus. I suspect that that suspension of belief does exist within viewers, even though they cling to the concious interpretation that ketchup is ketchup. I suspect that they’re disturbed when ketchup is blood.»

Ten Years Later his video-liquid performances Santa Chocolate Shop (1997), a pathological Santa shitting chocolate as symbol of cultural framing and conditioning, Paul McCarthy examines the distressed state of the human psyche reversing the process onto edible chocolate.

The artist will transform the Maccarone Gallery in New York into a chocolate-making factory and will be producing 1,000 figures daily. It is an extreme performance, not only very critical against consumism, also for the deeper meaning : Whoever looks will cease being spectator and will be transform in eater, taking part to the ritual.
Further the Chocophagia recalls the Dionysian element as a basic structure of human psyche: a vital element to be brought into consciousness. Perversions represent infact an unsuccessful attempt to solve the unconscious conflicts provoked by repressing human nature.

PETER PAUL CHOCOLATES
Edibles by Paul McCarthy

Opening November 15th 10AM-8PM
http://www.maccarone.net/
From Nov. 15 to Dec. 24, 2007

“If you’re remixing popular music you change the rhythm or the sound-What I do is something entirely different. I have thought for a long time about what to call what I do. I liked the word ‘remix’ because it comes from youth culture.

What I could never escape was Germany, and being German.”

GEORG BASELITZ, Auftritt am Sandtreich II – bei + 30 C (Remix), 2006
Oil on canvas

Georg Baselitz is one of Germany’s most prolific and well-known living artists. Born in Saxony in 1938 – painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. Selecting subject matter (figures, animals, birds, landscapes and still-lifes) and placing them in dramatic settings, Baselitz’ works also place the viewer in a world of heightened self-consciousness to confront the being with the brutalities of history and the human tragedies.

He also partakes of a particular rebel sensibility and – like Camus Homme révolté - examines several countercultural figures and movements to cast anti-heroes as a strategy to liberate the subject matter, from the grotesque one, to the broken soldiers of the Fracture paintings and the inverted figures of the disturbing upside-down paintings.

Baselitz’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin, caused a public scandal. Two of the pictures, “The Big Night Down The Drain”/ “Die große Nacht im Eimer” (1962/63) and the “Naked Man”/ “Nackter Mann” (1962), are seized by the public prosecutor. The ensuing court case does not end until 1965. Again in 1980, at the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, he caused a stir with a monumental carved wooden figure, which appeared to making a Hitlerian salute. as well as the sixteenth century German woodcuts and African sculptures.

Georg Baselitz photographed by Lothar Wolleh, Mülheim, 1971

Remix Paintings is title of the exhibition of recent paintings by Georg Baselitz at Gagosian Gallery – New York
.
In the recent Remix Paintings, Baselitz has revisited the most provocative aspects of his own history, such as Die grosse Nacht im Einer and Die grossen Freunde, and made new versions or interpretations of them, with the experience of hindsight. Enlarged and rapidly painted with swathes of bright, transparent hue across white canvas and explosive, meandering lines, the Remix paintings are radical transubstantiations – part-caricature, part-ghost– of their muted, more ponderous predecessors. The spontaneity with which they are executed gives rise to mnemonic flashes of things in the past, present, and future. The references to Hitler, once ambiguous, are now clearly articulated. The impulse to improve, clarify, and update is clearly evident, but the haunting, fleeting quality of the Remix work has also to do with a mature artist’s meditations on time, presence, failure and possibility.

Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th Street – New York

Opening reception for the artist: Friday, November 9th, from 6 to 8 pm

Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th Street – New York

An international jury declared Janek Simon the winner of this year’s Views, the Prize for Young Polish Art. The 10.000 € prize is a joint project between Deutsche Bank Foundation and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw.

Janek Simon combines a “charming lightness” with subversive strategies. Many of his projects are charcterized by an anarchist wit, e.g., when he gave lectures on edible plants or the art of lock picking.

In Madagascar, Simon initiated a Polish year including an art exhibition – though without any participation of Polish artists. For Views, Simon exposes absurd, beetle-like creatures made of bread and metal in the halls of the museum. These low-tech constructions crawl on the floor and eventually gather around some sort of shrine: an old TV set whose program is determined by a video mixer that blends the images of two TV channels. The mixing creates the impression of a shifting of reality, of a psychedelic disturbance of the obvious and everyday. Perhaps this work makes obvious reference to political realia and the metaphor of manipulation, but more important seems the theme of an experimentation with the everyday, of an activity beyond schemata.

http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/wy_wy_spojrzenia_2007

Blackwater USA is a private military company founded in 1997 by Erik Prince and Al Clark. It has alternatively been referred to as a security contractor or a mercenary organization by numerous reports in the international media. Blackwater is based in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where it operates a tactical training facility that it claims is the world’s largest. The company trains more than 40,000 people a year, from all the military services and a variety of other agencies. The company markets itself as being “the most responsive, cost-effective means of affecting the strategic balance in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere.”

Last week I subscribed myself to the Blackwater Newsletter, just to see what do they talk about and what do this kind of global private police thinks.

On september 16th Iraqi officials said 17 people, including women and children, were killed and 27 were wounded when Blackwater guards fired on motorists around Nusoor Square. The Iraqi investigation has concluded the shootings were an act of “premeditated murder” and recommended that Blackwater pay $8 million to families of each of the people killed.

Then Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki asked the U.S. State Department to “pull Blackwater out of Iraq”.
So these are not good times fot Balckwater, although they received more than 700 millions dollars in contracts from the governement, they decided to ask help to every american citizen, just yesterday arrived to me a really funny message that invites subscribers to make pression to the congress:

“While we can’t ask that each supporter do everything, Blackwater asks that everyone does something. Contact your lawmakers and tell them to stand by the truth. Correspondence should be polite and professional. We don’t support generating negative messages. Tell the Blackwater story and encourage your representatives to seek the truth instead of reading negative propaganda (?? 17 deads are negative propaganda??) and drawing the wrong conclusions.

Suggested themes:

- Cost efficiency of Blackwater – saving the US taxpayer millions of dollars so that the US Government doesn’t have to take troops from their missions or send more into harms way

- Professional population of service veterans and mature law enforcement personnel

- Sacrifice in lives lost by Blackwater saving US diplomats without one single protectee harmed

Expanding our communications effort starts with you. Pass the word – pass the truth.”…….

A traditional legend holds that if visitors throw a coin into the fountain, they are ensured a return to Rome. Instead a man threw a bucket of red paint into Rome’s Trevi Fountain on Friday, coloring the waters of the 18th-century monument bright red in front of an astonished crowd.

The man escaped, leaving a box containing leaflets, referring to Futurist that claimed responsibility for the act: The red paint was a protest for expenses incurred in organizing the Rome Film Festival and symbolically referred to the event’s red carpet, ANSA reported.

The monument, at the juncture of three roads (tre vie) marks the terminal point of the “modern” Acqua Vergine, the revivified Aqua Virgo, one of the ancient aqueducts that supplied water to ancient Rome. Designed by architect Nicola Salvi with Bernini’s touch, the Trevi Fountain was finished in 1762 by Giuseppe Pannini, who substituted the present bland allegories for planned sculptures of Agrippa and “Trivia”, the Roman virgin.

Black and white movie lovers will for sure remember this fountain for a glamorous Anita Ekberg’s bathing into the fountain in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita:

The art of Leon Ferrari is characterized by protests: Against politics and Christian religion. In 1976 he was forced to move to Brazil:

I became a full-time artist there. In Buenos Aires I made my living as an engineer and made works of art in my spare time. I was treated well in Sao Paulo and did not suffer being in exile

Ferrari ’s famous sculpture titled Western and Christian civilization (1964) shows a crucified Christ tied to an American fighter jet. His arms span the wings as he grasps a missile on either side, resembling a cross.

It was meant as a protest against the Vietnam War. However, it was not included in the exhibition in the Di Tella institute because they did not want to offend the church, but it was hanging there in the week before the opening so everybody saw it anyway. I left the sculpture in a deposit when I moved to Brazil and virtually forgot about it. Then I found this old receipt and went to have a look thinking it would have disappeared because I had stopped paying years ago. However, the man in charge of the deposit recognized me and after sort of settling the bill I took it with me. The work was exhibited various times since then, but it would be good to have a permanent place because it is stored again.

Until 21 november the sculpture is being exhibited at 52 Venice Biennale.

Casa Blanca, performance, Leon Ferrari y Pons

El arte de la eterna rebeldía

In 2000 he showed an installation of Christs and virgins playing chess with devils and penises, against the promises of eternal life. He also paid homage to condoms, which he would accompany by texts saying that by opposing these the church was promoting aids, whereas in a series of collages he denounced their collaboration with the military dictatorship. During the sixties, Ferrari participated in exhibitions like Malvenido Rockefeller protesting this politician’s visit to Argentina and ‘Tucumán Arde’, where treacherous economic politics had led to the closure of sugar factories leaving people in misery. His 2001 exhibition in Spain, which dealt with torture and the Catholic Church, was met with demonstrations and prayer meetings, and even paint-throwing and tear gas. In 2004, his exhibition in Recoleta, Buenos Aires, was forced to close following intervention by a Catholic priest and a subsequent court order. Protests and government action allowed the exhibition to reopen

-¿Le preocupa la censura de tus obras?

-A diferencia de la práctica tradicional de los artistas que cuando les censuran una pieza retiran toda su obra, yo dejo el resto, porque me parece que la censura forma parte de la obra. En el caso del ICI, por ejemplo, era mejor el espectáculo de la gente afuera que lo que pasaba adentro… Hicieron una misa en la puerta y rezaban el rosario, con carteles y figuras religiosas. Hasta me tiraron una granada de gas lacrimógeno. Con la reacción del publico las obras se vuelven una verdadera intervención. En el 92 expuse una obra que se llamaba La Justicia, en la que una gallina defecada en una balanza y me escribieron de todo: “”Qué culpa tiene la gallina de que vos quieras hacer arte”, “”Gallo: cagate en este arte deshumnanizante” y “Ojalá te encierren a vos”. Con eso armé al año siguiente una muestra que se llamó Autocensura. La gallina, esta vez, estaba embalsamada.

-¿Le parece peor la censura del público que la oficial?

-Peor no… mejor. Hay algunos, incluso, que se acercan a la verdad: los que me dicen herejes, por ejemplo. En cambio, no deja de llamarme la atención esa preocupación excesiva por la gallina. La Sociedad Protectora de Animales mandó una carta pidiendo que la sacara. Yo les contesté explicándoles que esa gallina estaba a la espera de que la degollaran y que, por lo tanto, tenía mucho mejor destino como obra de arte. Más satisfacción me dio cuando alguien me puteó porque hacía cagar una paloma blanca sobre una imagen del Juicio Final de Miguel Angel. Por lo menos sentí que había llegado mi crítica a la cultura. El Bosco, Miguel Angel, Giotto, sin dudas hicieron maravillas pero que justificaron una cultura basada en la tortura, en la persecución, en el castigo… Ese arte avaló el accionar de la Iglesia. Así que la reacción de este hombre me sirvió para constatar de que alguien me escuchaba. Las protestas intervienen directamente sobre la obra y la completan. Peor que las puteadas es la indiferencia.

Source:Leon Ferrari

Festival In Rome