Posted: 09 Jun 2010 06:26 PM PDT

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LONDON.- Having been championed in Saatchi's "Newspeak: British Art Now", Jonathan Wateridge has a new solo exhibition showcasing a series made up of 7 mammoth works.

Another Place consists of a series of seven large oil paintings, each 3m x 4m, depicting scenes from the production and narrative of a fictional American film that is centred on an unseen catastrophic event.

The production process of the paintings is in itself redolent of film‐making. Prior to the first marks on canvas, scale model sets are built, props fabricated, costumes made and performers cast in each role.

Executed in a robust realist manner, the paintings are on the one hand akin to a grand historical cycle and on the other, a playful study of genre structures. But this is serious play, an adult playground – role‐play for grown‐ups that has more sober subtexts.

A sense of unease and disquiet pervades the scenes and though each picture relates to the disaster, there is only one explicitly catastrophic image: a section of an overpass or directional interchange that has collapsed onto the ground below.

The theme of divided strata runs throughout the series. This is represented by certain motifs such as the division caused by the collapsed highway, or within the work's fictional cityscape: the relationship between hillside and valley living and its connotations of class and economy.

Another central facet of the pictures is an exploration of their status as a construct. These paintings are elaborate fictions but with visible seams. Schisms within the work are created by blurring the boundaries between the narrative and the production process. Within this alternate reality, the series exploits the different angles from which you can approach the paintings and establishes a Brechtian sense of defamiliarisation and estrangement.

The paintings draw you in and establish a genuine, though uncanny, relationship with the figures depicted, which, like a ventriloquial movement of the lips, is then disturbed by revealing the underlying construction.

The subtle dislocations within the narrative of each image emphasise a notion of intrinsic remove. Ultimately, in a world awash with the consumption of received and generic imagery, everything occurs to someone else and in another place.

'The Fix:' Dirty Energy's Undue Influence on American Political Life - Huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 09 Jun 2010 05:15 PM PDT

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Like most Americans, I am horrified by the unending catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Even with the latest containment cap in place, oil is likely to hemorrhage from BP's ruptured well until August or beyond.

As I try to convey in my new video, "The Fix," I am appalled by what this spill is doing to Gulf fishermen, families, communities and wildlife. But I am also disgusted by what it reveals about the oil industry's role in American political life.

With their deep pockets, oil companies have purchased loose safety regulations, slack oversight and support from key lawmakers. Last year alone, the industry spent a $168 million on lobbying -- $16 million of which came from BP. The blowout on the Deepwater Horizon is a symptom of this undue influence.

It is time for the collusion to stop. As long as it continues, Americans will pay the price in the form of devastated ecosystems and a fossil fuel addiction that benefits oil companies, not ordinary citizens.

I know what it's like to have a job that depends on towing the line.

I worked in the oil fields when I was a teenager, and my dad worked in the accounting department of Standard Oil. I remember the uneasy feeling that resulted when I heard company representatives claim oil exploration was great for American society, yet that contrasted with what I was actually experiencing on the job. The truth was that oil exploration was great for the oil industry.

Long after I left the oil fields, I felt disgusted by the way oil companies advertised themselves as conservationists. BP plugged itself as "Beyond Petroleum," yet oil still accounts for the vast majority of its business. BP claimed its technology was safe, yet 11 men are dead and oil still permeates the whole coast years after the "cleanup." Furthermore, the company has a long history of safety violations that have resulted in other deaths and environmental destruction. BP also said in 2008 it could handle a spill 10 times the size of the current disaster, yet its attempts to end the gushing in the Gulf have failed.

We need to stop buying into these fictions, and the BP spill is our reality check -- a reminder that the oil industry looks out for Number One in the Gulf, in the Arctic and in Washington.

Recently, President Obama announced several measures that will reign in Big Oil's influence. He strengthened regulations governing offshore operations and called on the Justice Department to examine BP's role in this fiasco. He also imposed a moratorium on new offshore drilling while a commission investigates the spill. And although I welcome the president's initial steps, some of these measures need to be stronger.

Ultimately, the only way to break the industry's hold on political decision making is for America to shift to more fuel efficient cars, more public transit and other technologies.

These are the solutions that will break America's addiction to oil and put more money in consumers' pockets. Right now, there is a clean energy and climate bill before Congress that could help unleash these solutions. The time for passage of this bill is NOW, not later.

I urge you to use your political influence -- your right to contact your elected officials -- and click here to tell your senators to vote for it. Citizen outrage and citizen action are some of our best tools for combating Big Oil's dirty influence.

You can also learn more about it in this short video I produced with NRDC:

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Anti-Supernaturalist's Guide to a "god-free" Mind - Associated Content

Posted: 09 Jun 2010 04:32 PM PDT

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Debunking: The Significance of Religious Discourse

Third, understand that nature itself is neither meaningful nor meaningless. Neither a source of comfort, as in natural theology, nor a source of despair, as in existentialism. Both comfort and despair are psychological errors rooted in the same mistaken presupposition that meaning could be found by searching "the starry heavens" for divine agents (gods) or by quarrying human inwardness for "the moral law within."

Finally, appreciate that the existence (or non-existence) of gods is irrelevant to our right to be members of a secular, open society.

To put the matter as only the Anti-Supernaturalist knows how: Even if the immoral, vicious, paternalistic 1-god of the big-3 monster theisms could be proven to exist, even if old Tom Paine's white-washed deistic divinity could be established by Reason — we have the sovereign right to reject any claim that it must be acknowledged, accepted, or worshiped.

• It follows, then that supernatural "phenomena" belong at best to fiction

The proper name 'Sherlock Holmes' refers to no person, living or dead. Holmes never lived. Holmes has no childhood, no formative years. He springs out of the received text fully formed, ex nihilo. Everything we know about Holmes comes from the imagination of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His writings are the only sacred text for all questions concerning the great detective.

Adoring fans and imitative authors just cannot limit themselves to the received text. They want more. Fan fictions — books, TV and move scripts — attempt to "reanimate" Holmes without doing violence to the real Holmes. Now, simply substitute 'Jesus Christ' for 'Sherlock Holmes'.

The truth emerges — Jesus belongs solely to historical fiction. The so-called gospels are not a Bildungsroman. He springs out of the received text fully formed, ex nihilo. His hellenistic divine alter-deo "Christ" is an alien life form. It belongs to dark fantasy comix as the World Avenger™.

You can no more have a personal relationship with Jesus or Christ than you can with Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Moriarity. Abstract nouns — god, spirit, anima, sin — follow the way of Holmes. All these terms belong to explanatory schema which explain nothing in the world.

Supernatural "phenomena" belong at best to historical fiction or dark fantasy. Often enough religious discourse can be dangerous fiction — witness the text of Revelation which encourages true believers to act out their anti-social hatreds and violent impulses.

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Fantagraphics Announces "Significant Objects: The Book" - Comic Book Resources

Posted: 09 Jun 2010 06:48 PM PDT

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Official Press Release

Since its debut, Significant Objects [ http://www.significantobjects.com ], the bold online inquiry into the relationship between narrative and the value of everyday objects, has been the subject of speculation by everyone from NPR to litbloggers to The New York Times' Freakonomics crew. Some theorized about the project's hypothesis, others about its methods and results.

Some just wanted to know: Will there be a book?

This last question can now be answered: Yes!

A collection of one hundred Significant Objects stories, seductively illustrated by top artists, will be published in 2011 by Fantagraphics Books.

This represents the most pleasing plot twist yet to the story of a very unlikely project that began as an experiment, turned into an experimental literary magazine secretly published on eBay, and currently raises money for youth tutoring nonprofits.

Founded by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, SignificantObjects.com appeared out of nowhere last summer, and has published an extraordinary series of 200 stories and counting – by William Gibson, Curtis Sittenfeld, Sheila Heti, Colson Whitehead, Nicholson Baker, Meg Cabot, Lydia Millet, Jonathan Lethem, and other talented writers – about ordinary stuff like novelty items, discarded souvenirs, and tasteless kitchenware picked up cheap at thrift stores and yard sales. The goal: To see if commissioning great stories about these insignificant things would increase their value – as measured in actual eBay auctions.

The LA Times's Jacket Copy blog summarized the project's questions: "Can a good story make something more valuable? What if it's entirely untrue?"

Significant Objects and its contributing writers sold piles of flea-market flotsam for thousands of dollars and, as The Economist's More Intelligent Life blog put it, "proved Walker and Glenn's theory that stories add immeasurable value to objects."

The New York Times's Freakonomics blog gaped at the "supersonic premium" which Significant Objects managed to create. "Is it the intrinsic utility and beauty of a commodity that creates its value," the Boston Globe's Brainiac blog queried, "or the stories we tell ourselves about them?"

Some observers suggested the Significant Objects experiment had invented a new business model: "This is just one (fun) example of many of content creators smartly using infinite goods (the stories) to make a scarce good (the trinket) more valuable, and putting in place a business model to profit from it," according to Techdirt. Cool Hunting speculated that the project had created "the first pay scale for writers based on emotional impact."

Of course, Significant Objects was never just about the marketplace. Most importantly, it was about writers "finding magic in unexpected things," as NPR's All Things Considered put it. The project has published first-rate fictions by best-selling novelists and pathbreaking up-and-comers, by literary stars and experimentalists, writers for The Daily Show and other TV programs, innovative improv comics, cartoonists, journalists, and writers of young-adult fiction, mysteries, thrillers, sci fi and much more.

"The roster of authors is beyond impressive." — the blog BookSlut

"It's a heck of a great idea and Walker and Glenn have assembled a really terrific collection of writers to participate" — Media Bistro's UnBeige blog

"Like a Salvation Army staffed by brilliant writers, Significant Objects has created a new kind of online journal — publishing and selling on eBay" — the blog GalleyCat

"If this is a cynical marketeer's scam," a columnist for The Independent (UK) suggested, "then consider me conned. Significant Objects combines one of the oldest of all media — the near-improvised short story — with the reinvigorated writer-reader relationship afforded by Web 2.0."

The experiment, in short, was a smash hit. With enthusiastic reader/buyers from Texas to Alaska, from New York to California, and everywhere in between, Significant Objects decided to funnel auction proceeds from its second and third volumes of stories to the tutoring programs 826 National and Girls Write Now.

Does the project point the way towards a new business model for literary publishing? Are we 21st-century skeptics in thrall to talismans and totems? Once the auction sales figures have been correlated with, say, narrative exposition strategy, will Significant Objects reveal the key to the relationship between narrative and value?

All of these questions and more will be addressed (and some answered) by the Significant Objects book, which will not only feature one hundred moving, absurd, surprising, and always entertaining stories from the project's three volumes. Thanks to Fantagraphics, it will also feature new illustrations by artists from the worlds of comics, skate graphics, rock posters, children's books, and the commercial and gallery arts.

The Significant Objects book will change the way you look at things, forever.

About the Editors of SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based journalist, editor, and cultural semiotics analyst. He cofounded the website HiLobrow.com; he's been a columnist for the Boston Globe's Ideas section and a contributing editor to other publications. He edited the nonfiction collection Taking Things Seriously (2007) and coauthored, with Mark Kingwell, The Idler's Glossary (2008). In the 1990s he published the critical-culture zine Hermenaut.

Rob Walker writes Consumed, a column that mixes business and anthropology, for The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, named by Salon as one of the best nonfiction books of 2008. His work has appeared in many media outlets, from The Wall Street Journal to The New Republic, from GQ to public radio program Marketplace. He is often called on as an expert on consumer culture, most notably in the recent Gary Hustwit documentary Objectified.

About FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS

Fantagraphics Books ( www.fantagraphics.com ) has been the world's leading publisher of comics and graphic novels since 1976, with titles by Robert Crumb, Charles M. Schulz, Joe Sacco, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware and many others. In 2007, the company launched its prose division, which includes books by Alexander Theroux (Laura Warholic), Stephen Dixon (What Is All This?), Monte Schulz (This Side of Jordan), and now Significant Objects.

Tags: fantagraphics, significant objects, joshua glenn, rob walker

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Fiction

Rabu, 09 Juni 2010

“All Visual Arts Presents Jonathan Wateridge's "Another Place" - Art Daily” plus 3 more

“All Visual Arts Presents Jonathan Wateridge's "Another Place" - Art Daily” plus 3 more

Debunking: The Significance of Religious Discourse

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