Friday, October 16, 2009

Donna Haraway @ CCA on 10.20.09


Donna Haraway will be giving a lecture at CCA next week. She wrote "The Cyborg Manifesto", "Promise of Monsters","When Species Meet"... Here's a speech on YouTube, "Cyborgs, Dogs and Companion Species", about the birth of the kennel, cyborgs, dogs and companion species, humans, machines, computer, organisms, technoscience, genetics, nature, culture, consciousness, philosophy, emergent ontologies, social relationships, societies, Michel Foucault, figure, reference, cyborg manifesto, and socialist feminism, given to the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS, Switzerland, in 2000.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Reading for Oct 14

Here's the email from Scott just in case you're wondering if he has sent you an email yet. For the PDF of Raymond Carver's "Feathers" email Scott (or me).

Scott:
For next week please read the attached short story by Raymond Carver. Please let me know if you have any trouble opening the PDF. Don't be scared by the amount of pages, it's fiction so it should be a quick read for you. Funny isn't a word often attributed to Carver, but his work can be considered a blending of humor and sadness. I'd like to spend some time next week discussing the fine line between funny and sad, so feel free to bring to class anything else you think may fit in this category. I'm also hoping to discuss the use and metaphor of the ecological as a tool for humor in contemporary art. Again, if you have any examples or something you'd like to discuss, please bring it with you. Thanks, and have a good weekend.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Montblanc Gandhi Pen

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/02/AR2009100203191.html

Or it could be yet another ironic postmodern art piece that purports to critique commodity culture and that's being sold to wealthy collectors... Top that Jeff Koons. (Also Kate Spade Store.)

"Images of Mohandas K. Gandhi, father of modern India and icon of asceticism and nonviolence, have ended up in some unlikely places before, from ads selling Apple computers to counter-culture T-shirts. But it's fair to say that the latest incarnation may be the most ironic: Gandhi, in his signature loincloth, hawking a $23,000 fountain pen named in his honor.

The Montblanc pen, unveiled for the celebration of what would have been Gandhi's 140th birthday on Friday, has prompted howls from Hindu groups and Gandhists who say the sticker price is the lifetime income of many of India's poor. The limited-edition fountain pen in 18-carat solid gold is engraved with Gandhi's image and tricked out with a saffron-colored mandarin garnet on the clip and a rhodium-plated nib. ... A billboard put up this week over Mumbai's teeming slums shows a gaunt Gandhi next to next to an image of the swanky pen, with golden threads woven around it to represent Gandhi's spinning wheel."

From: "Montblanc's Gandhi Pen Causes Howls in India" by Emily Wax, Washington Post Foreign Service, 10.02.09.