serendipityoucity

I head about this Ztohoven art action a while ago and found it to be brilliant.  You also have to love a culture that has a built in sense of humour like the Czechs seemingly do.

To hack into the CT2 broadcast, Ztohoven simply switched cables on an unmanned, remote camera at a limestone quarry in the mountains, which the artists had scouted three years earlier. Then they piped in their video. The name Ztohoven makes a pun in Czech that means both “out of it” and an obscenity. Rightly, the group presumed this would tip off viewers that the explosion was fake, in case they hadn’t already guessed it from the cheesy special effects.

The prank was a broadcast of a nuclear mushroom cloud behind a mountain that was broadcast on television one morning instead of the weather. The prank was

“not meant to be threatening but to land softly on the public consciousness so that people won’t let themselves be brainwashed.”

This form or art in czecholosvakia seems to have a long pedigree

It belongs to a history of Czech literary and artistic mystification and sly, deadpan humor that is the expression of a small, underdog nation dominated for generations by outsiders, one after another.

Actionism is the name attributed to this form of art.  I am having a difficult time to find roots and a good explanation of it, there is a Viennese Actionism formed in the 60s that had a very corporeal form of art where

Vienna actionists were treating body as an artistic "material" as equivalent to canvas, oils or other artistic means of expressions.. (see photos and other material)

There is Russian Actionism that seems unrelated to the Vienna group and seems to have its roots in literary movements, particularly Russian Futurism.  I think there are some very important parallels to hactivism particulary the artististic form found at the computer chaos congress in Germany and culture jamming. I found a PCjacking blog entry and media actionism and a great project called voteauction.  I read about a group of activists/artists who are inserting their art into national art galleries and I have always loved the Guerrilla Girls.

My favorite coffee table books remains The Design of Dissent by Milton Glaser and Mirko ILIC.  The book is a compillation of very controversial graphics that play with deep seated cultural symbolism in sometimes pleasantly aesthetic ways to convey disturbing messages, grotesteque meat art, graphics and visual metaphors, dark humour which most importantly invoke critical visual thinking.  This is also part of the work of graphic artists delivering important social messages. sensibilid(ad) does a great job of assembling these campaings.

I am enjoying this new interest in art.  My last visit to the national gallery awoke a new appreciation for the artistic movements behind some of my favorite art works.  I have loved these pieces but was not ready to absorb what they meant in their context and how they emerged on the scene.  I am also finding connections between industrial, futuristic and voticist art and infrastructure.  Reading Neal Stephenson literary scifi art has also given me some context in understanding technological movements. He also introduced me to the cultural roots of radical and luddite movements, the former the savant’s uncritical love of industry, technology and modernity and the latter a reactionary movement related to the social results of the industrial revolution and the havoc it wreaked on the lower and working class with alienation, pollution, abject poverty, injury, injustice, urbanity and poverty. 

ps-I just remembered something!  There was an Artivistic event in Montreal recently and I would include that as a form actionism.

Artivistic is a multidisciplinary event devoted to the exploration of the interplay between art, information and activism…The principal aim of Artivistic is to celebrate the importance of connection and the interdisciplinary nature of various instruments of social change.

I do not know where this is taking me, but I am most enjoying the journey. 

via: NyTimes Article: That Mushroom Cloud? They’re Just Svejking Around