This video shows
9 February 2011
Music: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” from “Seven Last Words From The Cross” by James MacMillan
London Chamber Orchestra / Polyphony / James MacMillan (Conductor).
Images taken from the “Abu Ghraib” series by Fernando Botero .
From Art and Politics Now blog in the USA:
Dead of Irak, 2008, foamcore.
32 x 32 in.
Iraq map and glass microbeads 1/2 mm. diam. each (about 1 million).
Close up the separate small red shiny beads jump out at us, we can feel them physically on our skin, crawling on us, as a flow of blood, as a coming tide, it is our flow, the flow that is a tide of death, it comes from our bodies to the bodies of the Iraqis. …
The artist Athena Tacha describes it as follows:
“It came out of my pain and sense of impotence for stopping the War. I had actually done in the past, on an off, political art (mostly activist about the environment), particularly during the Vietnam war. On my website, look particularly at my Massacre Memorials and its statement, but here is another statement I made recently in a feminist context:
“…deciding to make public art IS a political act in itself. In 1970, instead of becoming a volunteer nurse in Vietnam, I personally opted to bring my art into the public domain and make it accessible to all (not just to the intellectual elite who goes to museums, or to the rich who can buy it). As I stated in my interview with Landscape Architecture magazine (which published the first important article on my public art in May 1978), I wanted to “bring art into the lives of people and endow it with a social function” (such as creating sensitively designed plazas, recreation parks, riverbanks, etc.).”
In a way I consider the Dead of Iraq a sequel to the my Massacre Memorials of the early 1980s.”
Feminism and poster art: here.
The Guerrilla Girls, a collection of radical, left-leaning pop artists famed for wearing gorilla masks and fishnets to highlight sexism, racism, and other pillars of injustice, announced this week that its historic archive will be kept, for posterity, by the bluest of America’s blue-chip cultural institutions: here.
Feminism and art, discussion in the Netherlands: here.
Related articles
- Soldier’s father says Stop Afghan war (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)