The comic “La Trompestad” by Michelle Sayles is the perfect illustration of what it feels like to live in the first week of Donald Trump's America. Although we may feel defeated, we must remain vigorous in our fight against Trump and his administrations' spectacle of “alternative facts”. Michelle Sayles is an artist and community organizer living in Burlington, Vermont. You can find more of her work on her blog. – Craig E. Ross
Read moreOut of the Castle and Into the Street: Art Under Trump
Revision of John Heartfield's collage self-portrait with the Berlin chief of police (1929)
Here we are. Inauguration Day for Donald Trump. We are through the dystopian looking glass. And now “resistance” isn’t just something that would be nice if it happened. It is a necessity. From working people, from students, from community members, and yes, from artists. By any means necessary.
Trump took the White House for two reasons. 1) The failure of the Democratic Party. And 2) The mobilization of bigotry. America’s “political center,” in the form of the Democratic Party, was unable and unwilling to explain the crises of neoliberal austerity, to mobilize people on the basis of social class and solidarity. This political failure is also a cultural one – of avant-garde and popular culture alike.
Read moreThe Nature of Mass Demonstrations
John Berger.
John Berger is dead. There are very few people who, when they pass on, leave you at such a loss for words. Mostly because there are so few as versatile and prodigious as he was. Art critic, painter, poet, novelist, socialist. And he was consistently brilliant in every one of these roles. Often, he was more than one simultaneously. His first novel A Painter of Our Time was available for a month in 1958 before the publisher withdrew it under pressure from the anti-communist Congress for Cultural Freedom. When he won the Booker Prize in 1972, he donated half the prize money to the Black Panthers. Landscapes, a recently published collection of his works, nestles musings on Cubism next to moving tributes to Rosa Luxemburg.
Read moreFuck 2016, Support Red Wedge
Trump effigy sent on fire during a Guy Fawkes celebration in the UK
Count us among those who wish to drive a stake into the heart of 2016. This was a year in which the world definitively became a darker, more impoverished place. We lost battles and we lost friends. Trump won. Aleppo fell. The Ghost Ship burned and looks to have opened a rash of low-level war against DIY art venues. Some great artists left us and some important comrades. There were victories, and important ones at that (Standing Rock, the defeat of a few authoritarians at the polls in Europe), but too few
Read moreThe People and Politics of Punk
The student butterfly that flapped its wings in Paris, May 1968 led to an earthquake which shook factory walls across western Europe in the 1970’s. Out of the dust emerged an ugly snarling rodent called punk rock.
The 1970s in the UK was a time of open conflict. Strike leaders sent to prison and then freed by a massive strike wave, teenagers fighting in the streets against each other, against the police and against the army in Ireland, miners strikes, power cuts, three day week, women battling for equal rights, Tory government brought down. The working class – loud, proud and winning.
Read moreThe Return of the Crowd (Call for Submissions)
We are looking for essays, papers, reviews, short stories, poetry, visual art, comics, and other submissions that deal with some of these questions. What does the return of crowds mean for an insular art world and its weak avant-garde? What are the aesthetics of anti-capitalist totalities? What are the aesthetics of today’s neo-fascists? What is the difference between socialist and fascist aesthetic leveling? What lessons for contemporary art and culture can we take from the Russian Revolution – and its artists and writers? What about lessons from other key revolutions – the Mexican Revolution for example? What about the aesthetics of anti-fascist struggles – in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, in occupied France? What are the aesthetic relationships between class and other identities in trying to build militant anti-fascist resistance as well as counter-narrative to neoliberal capitalism? What do the crowds of art history and past literatures – Zola, Courbet, Brecht – have to tell us about making socialist art today?
Read moreintroducing wedgeshop
Fluxus mail-order warehouse/fluxshop (1964-65) and wedgeshop website (2016)
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 moreThe Ghost Ship is Our Triangle Fire
Victims of the Ghost Ship fire: Jennifer Kiyomi Tanouye, Alex Vega and Michela Gregory, Ara Jo, Alex Ghassan, Cash Askew, David Cline, Johnathan Bernbaum, Johnny Igaz, Denalda, Feral Pines.
America 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 moreSoulèvements / Uprisings
Sigmar Polke, Against the Two Superpowers: For a Red Switzerland (1971)
We 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 moreVictory to Striking Cinema Workers
Recently, 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).
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Dollar Art House Sells Out
These 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 morePoem for Fidel Castro (Song of Protest)
Fidel Castro with Chilean President Salvador Allende
“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 moreThe Resistible Rise of Donald Trump: Two Performances
Poor 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 moreFlawed Silence: Five Poems
Written 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
Trump, Art, Music + Revenge
President. 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 moreThese People Live Here: Conceptualism and the New Documentary Poetics
In 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 moreThe Comedy is Over
“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 moreWest Aleppo
This 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 moreDylan as Poet
Bob 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: Ideas That Outrage
Dario Fo.
Dario 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...
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