ZONE OF THE FREE: FREE ART

Showing posts with label FREE ART. Show all posts

Friday, June 29, 2012

THE PORG POST

By THE PORG

More artwork by the porg here

Friday, June 8, 2012

59 Rivoli is a collective of 30 artists’ studios (20 belonging to permanent residents and 10 for temporary residents) that is open to the public year-round, Tuesday through Sunday from 1PM to 8PM. You do not need reservations (although large groups may want to call ahead just to give the studios a heads up), nor is there an entrance fee (although donations are welcome). You do not need to be an artist yourself, just walk in! On the ground and 1st floor is a gallery housing temporary exhibits, concerts every Saturday afternoon and frequent special events. This artists’ collective started as a squatters’ quarters in 1999 an abandoned bank building and was purchased by the city of Paris in 2002, marking the start of a partnership between the artists and the city. Now, the studios receive approximately 1500 visitors each week. (source)

The mid-1800s Haussmann era building at 59 Rivoli was an artist squat for years before being renovated by the city and returned to a collective of artists.

After Crédit Lyonnais abandoned the space, a group of artists called “KGB” (standing for Kalex, Gaspard, and Bruno) claimed the building in 1999. Despite the dead pigeons and syringes that littered the deteriorating structure, the group was soon hosting exhibitions and performances under the name “Chez Robert, électrons libres.” Although the space was illegally occupied, by 2001 it was getting 40,000 visitors a year, making it the third most visited center for contemporary art in Paris.

In 2006, the city of Paris acquired 59 Rivoli as part of its effort to bring legality and building safety to popular illegal artist squats. After renovations, it reopened in 2009 with studios for over 30 artists who pay minimal rent. The six stories of 59 Rivoli and its exhibits are free and open to the public. While the wild art that once covered the facade is now much more tame, there are still whimsical and expressive installations that turn up on the stone exterior.

- 59rivoli.org

Thursday, June 7, 2012

MASSIVE FLYER COLLAGE

Found a new desktop for my system..

Click to download the image if you are into freetekno flyers.

It be biiiig.. very big.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

ANARCHY AND ART BY ALLAN ANTLIFF

One of the powers of art is its ability to convey the human aspects of political events, ranging from war to revolution to sexual liberation. Art can also transform society, a theme that pervades this fascinating survey on art, artists, and anarchism since the nineteenth century.

In numerous essays, Allan Antliff interrogates moments of engagement when artists, poets, philosophers, and critics have confronted pivotal events over the past 140 years. The survey begins with artist Gustave Courbet and writer Emile Zola's activism during the 1871 Paris Commune (which established the modern-day French republic), and ends with an examination of anarchist art during the fall of the Soviet empire. Other subjects include the Neo-Impressionists and their depictions of the homeless in the 1890s; the Dada movement in New York City during World War I; the decline of the Russian Avant-Garde during the 1920s and 30s; the West Coast Beats of the 1940s and 50s; the Modernists of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s; and anarchistic responses to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by visual artists.

Exploring art's potential as a vehicle for meaningful social change from an anarchist perspective, Allan Antliff throws new light on what it means to be radical.

GRAB IT HERE

Thursday, May 24, 2012

THE CYCLOWN CIRUS

We cycle from town to town, looking for a place to stay, co-operating with locals and the community and performing in the street or at a pre-arranged locations (usually some kind of Social centre) and giving workshops after the event if we have time. Getting up to 15 people on working bikes, fed, amused, happy, well rested and ready to perform to their best for popcorn is a vast achievement in itself! The show has to be seen to be believed - it involves live music, live accidents, clowning, tightrope, monocycling, bike jousting, diabolo, juggling, acrobatics, magic, fire spitting and dancing, acrobalance, trapeze and incredible jumping mad Mexican bean chaos! It is a great experience meeting people from a vastly varied ways of life, learning about other attitudes, languages, history, the world today, nature and how to keep a team of clueless foreigners, entertaining, laughing and creating with a bunch of junk we carry with us.

- www.cyclown.org

Monday, May 14, 2012

THE PRIVATIZATION OF CREATIVITY

The Privatization of Creativity
The Ruse of "Creative Capitalism"
by Max Haiven / May 9th, 2012

Published @ Dissident Voice

The problem with the new hype around creativity is that it presumes that the economic system we have, with all its gross injustices and horrifying effects (global warming, child poverty, unrewarding jobs, imperial warfare, the exploitation of the third world), is inevitable. It doesn’t really imagine that everyone will get to express their creativity and enjoy the life of the artist. In fact, the new hype over creativity actually (ironically) makes us less creative in how we think about social problems and solutions. It makes creativity an individualized thing, the “private property” of each isolated person.

[...]

What capitalism does, in effect, is fundamentally shift what we could call the “economy of creativity”: it drastically alters what sorts of creativity we think are valuable and it focuses humanity’s creative energies towards earning ever greater profit for a few. While this system has produced many fine things, it is destroying the planet and most people’s lives because it has no broad vision of a decent future. It is driven only by irrational and pathological competition for profit, not by any compassionate and collective social vision. Imagine what the world would be like if we focused our creativity and energy towards other ends?

[...]

What will be key for organizers and activists fighting within and against the hype of creative capitalism, whether they are fighting worker exploitation or neighbourhood gentrification, will be acknowledging that the promise of creativity, while hollow, truly does move many people. It is precisely because our world offers so few substantive opportunities for creative expressions and efficacy that the rhetoric of creativity is so appealing. Creativity is valuable. Our task can be limited neither to pointing out that creativity is a carrot, nor showing that along with that carrot is the stick of brutal global economic terror. Nor can it be a flight into the most esoteric and self-reflexive forms of creative expression in a vain hope to avoid commodification. Instead, we need to focus on making it clear that real, deep creativity can never be achieved as an individual possession but is always a collective process, bound up with values of equality, social justice and community. In other words, the promise of creativity can only be fulfilled in a very different society than ours. Creativity must embrace its tradition, potential and promise as a key part of cultivating critical, revolutionary communities that resist capitalism, colonialism, gender oppression and racism and create fierce and sustainable alternatives within and against the status quo. Creativity is, in part, the way we refuse our current “reality” and, in a very small and often abstract way, propose or model something different. When creativity joins, supports and critiques social movements for radical change, or when it helps imagine and build the post-capitalist society of the future in the present, it is at its very best.