Red Wedge Magazine is pleased to announce our new project wedgeshop; aiming to distribute socialist and popular avant-garde art, media and cultural artifacts (at affordable rates that compensate artists). At wedgeshop you will be able to order copies of Red Wedge, subscribe to our print journal, order special chapbooks, pamphlets, posters, digital materials, t-shirts, and more. We are also building up a platform for our co-thinkers and other left-wing artists to distribute artwork. It has become clear that the institutions of the art world and the culture industry will not sufficiently support a popular avant-garde. It is up to us.
Read moreAmerica hates its artists. America hates its young working-class people. Thirty-six people are dead. They are victims of an art and music economy that doesn’t work for the majority of artists and musicians. They are dead because art has become financialized. They are dead because gentrification is taking away our right to the city – and pushing artists and young workers to the margins – especially (but not only) artists of color. And because of gentrification the urban life-rafts for gender non-conforming and queer young people are shrinking. You can’t stay in the small towns, but you can’t afford San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle and Portland.
Read moreWe desperately need to explore a new genealogy for radical art – one that does not focus on obsessive materiality or abstracted gestures (isolated from social catastrophe); that does not avoid the brilliant moments of resistance that sustain us, but is not simply propaganda (although we need propaganda). Soulèvements – curated by philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (winner of the 2015 Adorno Prize) – on display at the Jeu de Paume in Paris –provides an important contribution to exploring an alternative tradition for radical art.
Read moreRecently, one of Red Wedge's editors had the chance while in London to stop by the picket line at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. It was perhaps one of the more spirited and creative picket lines that he's attended in quite some time, particularly considering the bitter cold and the utter intransigence of management.
The Ritzy is part of the Picturehouse chain of cinemas in Britain, which presents itself as somewhat art-house but unpretentious (the Ritzy, for example, is currently showing Jim Jarmusch's latest film Paterson as well as Office Christmas Party).
Read moreThese are hard times. These were hard times before the ascendancy of Donald Trump; before the fascist human dust of the United States became emboldened; before the incoming administration started planning a series of social policy arsons. Times are even harder now. To pay for these hard times the Dollar Art House is selling out; or rather we are selling artwork and putting on some first rate poetry and musical performances. From 5pm to 11pm on Friday, December 9, the “Dollar Art House Sells Out” will feature music and performances by Poet X, IndyBlack, Sunni Hutton and Jesa D’Or, along with artwork by Craig E. Ross and Adam Turl.
Read more“To defend our beloved Cuba.” The closing line of this poem from the great Chilean communist and surrealist writer Pablo Neruda rather sums up how working and oppressed people – in Latin America and around the world – are feeling in the wake of Fidel Castro's death. There is a lot to say about Castro the man, but it is far less important than the Cuban Revolution he helped lead, build and maintain for more than fifty years against the outside pressures of American empire.
Read morePoor Mike Pence. Greeted with a friendly gaggle of actors who both recognize him and are willing to express well-meaning concern over the havoc he may wreak as vice president. Pity too Donald Trump, who now feels blindsided by the realization that the theater isn't somewhere he and his cohort can retreat from the consequences of their actions.
Trump's reaction is what ultimately makes the action of the Hamilton cast a Good Thing. The man spent fifteen months using his own bully pulpit in a far less kindly way.
Read moreWritten she lapsed my eyelids curse
Never subjugated to her thoughts worse
Dreaming of twinkled themes her subconscious works
Works night and day because her lips she tamed
Her words released could leave bodies slain
Quiet in spite of riveting details
Still her mouth only inhales
Their thoughts she thunk perhaps prematurely
Read morePresident. Donald. Trump. These are three words that never had any reality outside of a grotesque comic. Until now. The man who has bragged of sexual assault, threatened to “build a wall” and refused to denounce an endorsement from a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan is President of the United States.
Hate crimes and proto-fascist incidents are spreading across the country. A right-wing terrorist outfit in Texas is threatening to arrest and torture “diversity professors.”
Read moreIn 2015 it became clear that Viktor Shklovsky’s imperative to “make the stone stony” is a much simpler task than “making the corpse corpsely.” I am thinking of the use of autopsy transcript as poem, Kenneth Goldsmith’s appropriation of the shooting death of Michael Brown. [1] While this particular text was said to be uniquely parasitical and vampiric, likely as much for its arrogance as its form, it should be understood as the logical product of an aberration in American documentary poetics that has recently adopted the brand name “Conceptualism.” Goldsmith’s personal framing of Conceptualism holds that all that must be written has been written and must merely be re-packaged
Read more“Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, ‘Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.’ Man bursts into tears. Says, ‘But doctor... I am Pagliacci.’ Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains." – Rorschach, Watchmen
It’s easy to say that it’s because of Halloween. But why this Halloween? Why not last year or the year before? Will 2016 (already an ignominious year) be remembered as the year that sent in the clowns?
Read moreThis group of paintings has a non-linear connection to events in Syria. I started using this particular form – oil on large wood panels – when Syria was still a relatively tranquil country. None of the iconography I arrived at through shifting oil and pigment presaged, referenced or interpreted any of the digital images that have found their way to comfortably horrified audiences in the West. Yet after five years of following the Syrian nightmare from afar, I cannot help but see Syrian tropes in all of these paintings...
Read moreBob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His name had been occasionally mentioned as a possible nominee in the past decade or so, but he was seen as unlikely to win for two reasons. The obvious one is that as a singer-songwriter rather than a published novelist, playwright or poet, his work has stood outside mainstream notions of what constitutes “literature” for most of Western establishment opinion, although the Nobel did, long ago, honor Winston Churchill for his works of history.
The second reason this was unlikely is that Dylan is American, and therefore, as we know from a gaffe years ago from a ranking member of the Swedish Academy, a provincial...
Read moreDario Fo, who died this past week, was a great playwright of the years of unrest and rebellion in the 1960s and ’70s. His plays such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! were hilariously cutting critiques of life under capitalism as it went into crisis. His style of theatre was like a Brecht play performed by the Marx Brothers in the age of TV. They even became long running hits in London’s West End.
Brian Mulligan, a teacher, writer and performer who was part of the “alternative comedy” scene of the 1980-90s, said...
Read moreThe harsh noise EP Old Mole by St. Guillotine & The Red Mass is a musical séance of the ghost of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The intention of this work is to reinvigorate the spirit of Lenin within the consciousness of the working class through meditative contact with the dead revolutionary. This EP a part of St. Guillotine's ongoing propaganda campaign to spread The Communal Order of the Ouroboros. The Communal Order of the Ouroboros is an open coven for all communist witches, warlocks, and other magical and/or mystical Marxists. The only initiation to become a member of this anonymous coven, is to become possessed by the Spectre of Communism (the communal ghost of every living and dead communist).
Read moreThe artist behind Zeal and Ardor isn’t American. He’s Swiss, albeit of African heritage. Manuel Gagneux was prompted to begin the project by a 4Chan post. In an interview with Noisey’s Kim Kelly, he claims that he used the message boards as a starting point for his own musical experiments:
I used to make these threads where I would ask for musical genres, one would post “swing,” and the other would post “hardcore gabber techno” and I’d fuse the two and make a song out of it in 30 minutes. One day someone said “n*gger music,” and the other said “black metal.” I didn’t make the song then, but it stuck with me, and I thought it was an interesting idea.
Read moreThere have been key moments when forms and modes of perception and expression shift in a profound manner. Such shifts may be met with skepticism, even hostility. Eventually, a new paradigm seems to emerge, although the malleable nature of art is such that the new paradigm can co-exist with its forerunners – yet not always peacefully so. The predictable and easily danceable swing tunes of Benny Goodman-era jazz developed into the more amorphous, multi-dimensional bebop. The realism of 18th century paintings gave way to the new imageries of “modernism” and later to “postmodernism” (a term simultaneously impossible to prescriptively define and curiously passé).
Read moreThe comic below is titled "The Flood" and is by Michelle Sayles, an artist and community organizer living in Burlington, VT. You can find more of her work on her blog. – Craig E. Ross
Read moreConsumer Grade Film is a U.S. Midwestern collective of filmmakers focusing on low-budget, socially-conscious films. Their current projects include the short film Ubercreep, the feature film In Circles and the YouTube channel VHS Girl.In Circles tells the story of three teenagers, Carmen, Stephen, and Virgil, who "sell stolen prescription drugs in order to pay for an abortion, while the small farm town they live in is being threatened by a drilling company." Ubercreep tells the story of two women who are stalked by a driver from a ride sharing service. In late August Red Wedge’s Adam Turl spoke to Consumer Grade Film founders Carson Cates and Andrew Laudone.
Read moreIn the Spring of 1940, as the Nazis conquered France and were the dominant power on the European continent, the exiled German Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote his final work, Theses on the Philosophy of History. In a moment of political defeat, with fascism triumphant, the parties of the far left lying prostrate and subjugated, Benjamin penned the following words...
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