Indieoma

TG: Andy Warhol famously said that “business art is the step that comes after art.” This is normally read in the context of the culture industry, but today I’m seeing a lot of artists start businesses as works of art in their own right. We can read Paul McCarthy’s “Chocolate Factory” as one response to Warhol, in this case interrogating some of the formal aspects of businesses. The most important thing about “Chocolate Factory” is that it loses

The Musée du Quai Branly opened in 2006 in Paris: a red Lego warehouse suspended in midair, with the nearby Eiffel Tower rising above the neighboring apartment houses. The Museum was built to house non-Western artworks previously scattered throughout the city, not without protest from the curators of their former homes. The masses have quickly embraced Quai Branly; the ticket queues are daunting enough that I abandoned my first effort to visit and returned the following day. Predictably, the mas

More than a century ago, George Santayana published The Sense of Beauty, one of a tiny handful of philosophical books on the arts worth multiple rereadings. In comparison with such topics as logic, metaphysics, politics, and the theory of knowledge, philosophical discussion of beauty has been confined to a minor role. Scattered classic books on the subject have appeared from the pens of great thinkers, but one still gets the sense that aesthetics is an underdeveloped field— like a young nation m

OBJECT-CULTURE: Art as Viral-Commodity A dialogue between Paul Sakoilsky & Mike Watson to coincide with the exhibtion of the same name at RED, London, 15th – 25th April 2010. Introduction: Mike Watson and Paul Sakoilsky have been frequently dialoguing since early 2007. Using IM as a means of communicating, first across London, now across Europe, they have developed their respective practices (Mike, theorist and writer, Paul artist and writer) closely, yet not without considerable divergence

The contemporary university is in crisis. Witness the recent protests over cuts at King’s, Sussex, Liverpool and elsewhere – a barely concealed rage against ever-increasing administration and management has turned into raw anger, with students and staff lining up to register their opposition to an education system that has attempted to emulate business for far too long. As Ross McKibbin aptly pointed out in a recent article for the LRB (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n04/ross-mckibbin/good-for-busines

Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative?’, published by Zero Books, presents a concise account of where we are at as a society in the Western world – more especially in the UK – and why we might want to seek change. Tracing the grip that Capital has on public life, entertainment and business, Fisher – focusing, in part, on a growing tendency towards bureaucracy in Education – argues that change is in dire need. Here regular contributor Mike Watson talks

MW: In your role as co-director of European Alternatives, as a writer and as a political campaigner, ‘freedom of speech’ has been a central theme. Many people in the West take their freedom of speech for granted, yet the nature of that ‘freedom’ is now questionable in many of the countries that have in the past held themselves to be beacons of such freedoms. You campaign particularly in reference to lack of press freedom in Italy. Tell me, to what extent is lack of press

Text of Roberto Saviano’s Tribute to Miriam Makeba, South African singer and civil rights activist. See Video Player (left) for full video tribute. The Miriam Makeba Tribute Concert takes place on 13th March in Rome, Italy ENGLISH My relationship with Miriam Makeba is odd, in the sense that I knew her music, I knew her face, but never did I believe that she could enter like this into my biography, my existence, in such a strong way; into the true and proper course of my life. When she d

‘In one of the key scenes in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men, Clive Owen’s character, Theo, visits a friend at Battersea Power Station, which is now some combination of government building and private collection. Cultural treasures – Michelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica, Pink Floyd’s inflatable pig – are preserved in a building that is itself a refurbished heritage artifact. This is our only glimpse into the lives of the elite, holed up against the effects of a catastr

Open Ideas Editor Mike Watson contributes a piece examining the notion of the artwork as an object independent of human interaction, and with it opens up an investigation into the artwork as it relates to the object-oriented philopsophies of Harman, Bryant, et al, as well as to Ray Brassier’s Nihilism. It has been three millennia since I was jettisoned from a shuttle as part of the Cultural Space Program; an initiative intended on communicating with other life forms via artworks, music pl

We are pleased to welcome Nick Srnicek, editor/writer for influential contemporary philosophy blog site ‘Speculative Heresy’, and editor, along with Levi Bryant Graham Harman, of forthcoming collection of essays (by luminaries and newcomers alike) around ‘Speculative Realism’: ‘The Speculative Turn’. Here Nick introduces us to ‘Speculative Realism’ a new trend in philosophy, which has breathed life into a discipline previously see as out of touch w

ENG: Interview with Alfredo Giangaspero – Editorial Director of Caposud. Translated by Adriana Panza. Who is Alfredo Giangaspero? Creator and promoter of the CAPOSUD project, after his degree in Economics and his studies in Photography, Alfredo Giangaspero, worked as a freelance photojournalist in various international scenarios, such the Balkans and the Middle East (Bosnia and Herzegovina,Iraq, Lebanon). He cooperated with the photojournalist agency Infophoto in Milan and, as a photo editor, w

Intro: We welcome Graham Harman of the American University of Cairo, the most well known protagonist of ‘Object Oriented Philosophy’ – a system of thought which takes ‘things’ to be central to existence, and which classes humans as just one of those things.  Harman cut his teeth reading Heidegger in his teens, and it was his new approach to this often misunderstood philosopher that gained Harman recognition with his books Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics, as Har

It is with great pleasure that we feature the work of artist, curator and ‘talking head’ Martin Sexton. Martin’s ‘Truth Machine – Free Stonehenge’ invites us to explore the corporate carnival that is 21st Century Stonehenge. This work forms just part of Sexton’s interaction with the ancient stone monument. He is shortly to display ‘Switching ON Stonehenge’ an active work – To explain: “a soundtrack plays out a segue of classic R

Artist Shiraz Bayjoo talks about his work with homeless individuals in London, UK. For corresponding documentary work see media player. Photo slideshow below. The Defined Change project worked with six ex-homeless individuals, chosen because they present a variety of living habits and spaces, and because of their success in reclaiming their lives. The project aimed to explore our everyday living situations, considering how they act as metaphors for the past and suggest our anxieties for the fu

This City/Arts edition gives us a welcome opportunity to profile Finnish painter and sculptor Jaakko Mattila, as the first of our artists profiles – interviews and articles on practicing artists from across the world. Jaakko lives and paints in two cities at at two ends of Finland: Oulu, where he grew up, and in Helsinki. Here he discusses his process, his turn towards Landscapes and the influence of the City of Oulu. MW: OK, I’ll ask you first to describe your working process. JM: we

Text by Martin Klang. we’re pleased to have Martin contribute to the until recently silent-for-a-while- ‘Open Ideas’ discussion platform. Martin is a Swede with five brains. We welcome one of them here, in this short unsettling take on singularities A point where continuity is broken. This page for example is not a singularity, it does nothing to crease the even surface of existence. It seems we are becoming more aware of singularities, and the conditions that trigger them.

London based artist Andrew Cooper responds to the Archival Funk call-out with two politically chgarged unsent e-mails, as he explains: Hi Mike, I do write emails to artists friends and don’t send them , they are like rants really. responses to some of the more cut throat elements to the art world . They are undigested and probably full of holes. I also make drawing like the one attached thats one of the worst at the moment. The title is just from the gut. I do have videos of performanc

Features Editor Mike Watson talks to artists Paul Sakoilsky and Raul Pina over Skype IM chat. The talk was conducted over three meetings, with Mike at home in Italy, and Paul, joined by Raul on the third session, Skyping from cafe’s in Shoreditch, London. MW: We at indieoma are looking at ‘Amo-rica’, that is America – the land we love to hate and hate to love – and still, even in these turbulent times, the most powerful nation on Earth. I thought this an opportune moment to bri

Thanks, though I am not sure that people outside Iran had assumed that this is a principally internet led operation.It was merely pointed out that twitter was enabling people to communicate from within Iran, between themsleves and to others, in a way that had not been seen before on this scale in uprisings. Further, the US and UK reticence to call a ‘spade’ a ‘spade’ (i.e. a rigged election) is more for fear of associating the opposition movement with the UK and the US th

Originally from http://thinwildmercurythought.blogspot.com/ The following is a guest post from Ali Alizadeh, Researcher at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. You can also see him discussing the situation in Iran here on BBC’s Newsnight. [This piece is copyright-free. Please distrbute widely.] Iran is currently in the grip of a new and strong political movement. While this movement proves that Ahmadinejad’s populist techniques of deception no lon

I think it’s vital we start out here with something concrete. After all, there is little point in theorising with no intended result in reality. And most theories, if useful at all are in any case a form of praxis in kernel form. A battle of ideologies is raging in Iran as we speak. Many of us look on with a feeling of disquiet. What can we do to help? Well, this is certainly not a localised problem, and we all have a right to be concerned with developments in Iran, as they go far beyon

Open Theory aims to foster a forum within Indieoma for the exchange of theoretical ideas. Watch this space for some introductory theory texts from philosophers, artists, wordsmith’s and more.