read them the riot act…after this commercial break

The Last Riot depicts beautiful children, teenagers as stylized warriors; an updated version of Caravaggio that sabotages militarism and brings it to a logical conclusion. Lord of the Flies. Its nihilistic. Its apocalyptic and its an exercise in the aesthetic of violence. But, its detached from the primal emotion of an Antonin Artaud. The grunt of life is smothered with shiny plastic. A virtual world where death is possible but not real, where death is both deferred and simultaneous. its 3D Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil; presented as a pleasing sedative where violence assumes the dimension of entertainment. A cartoon of the Raft of the Medusa that picks up some of the general critique of Guy Debord’s Societe de Spectracle where the contextual language is based entirely on gaming, celebrity and fashion marketing. Sacrifice and death is Byronesque romanticism……

Read More:http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/Utopia4.htmlWalter Benjamin. ---This salvation proves dependent on a kind of knowledge different from the teleological, the violent, the victorious knowledge, which is always produced out of the vain progress. What is the source of this power of truth and what is the status of our present ignorance that enables us to identify and recollect this messianic appearance in the vanity of the present continuum? What in our continuum, we should ask Benjamin, enables us to decide what is the voice of the myth and what is the appearance of the messianic since we are imprisoned in the present where myth is the sole prince of reality? In such a present we cannot trust "proofs" and "evidence." What, then, will be the ontological and epistemological status of Benjamin's conception of redemption? Benjamin's project will seek religious evidence and allegorical play in order to advance through philosophical pessimism into radical negative utopianism.---Read More:

The virtual world generated by the real world of the past twentieth century as the organism coming from a test-tube, expands, leaving its borders and grasping new zones, absorbs its founders and mutates in something absolutely new. In this new world the real wars look like a game on www.americasarmy.com, and prison tortures appear sadistic exercises of modern valkyrias. Technologies and materials transform the artificial environment and techniques into a fantasy landscape of the new epos. This paradise also is a mutated world with frozen time where all past epoch the neighbor with the future, where inhabitants lose their sex, and become closer to angels. The world, where any most severe, vague or erotic imagination is natural in the fake unsteady 3D perspective. The heroes of new epos have only one identity, the identity of the rebel of last riot. The last riot , where all are fighting against all and against themselves, where no difference exists any more between victim and aggressor, male and female. This world celebrates the end of ideology, history and ethic. Read More:http://www.aes-group.org/last_riot.asp

Q It’s important not to be able to tell the “good guys” from the “bad guys” in Last Riot. Why?…

click image for more...TAN: It created a weird world where technology and fashion fused with direct references to art history.AES+F: We wanted to make compositions reminiscent of mannerist and Baroque painting and especially Caravaggio but also to construct a virtual world which refers to contemporary virtual culture and virtual reality and all these kinds of computer games, video games and Hollywood movies; it’s a landscape that is continuous throughout and goes from a desert at night to a snowy morning in the mountains.

A Because we are not making this a Hollywood production. For us, it is very important to destroy this cliché of “good guys” and “bad guys,” which we see in media. Also, growing up in the Soviet Union, it was a very clear situation: you could tell who is the good guy, the bad guy, the repressor, the victim. I think what we describe is some kind of new situation in which all this is absolutely unclear. It’s a problem of liberal global capitalism, and we try to describe it. Read More:http://neditpasmoncoeur.blogspot.com/2011/03/aesf-interview-out-in-todays-post.html

click image for more:The characters exist in a world of trains, planes, missiles and wind farms, but their poses pay tribute to Baroque painter Caravaggio, as a soundtrack dominated by Wagner swirls around them.

Guy Debord:THE SELF-MOVEMENT of the spectacle consists in this: it arrogates to itself everything that in human activity exists in a fluid state so as to possess it in a congealed form — as things that, being the negative expression of living value, have become exclusively abstract value. In these signs we recognize our old enemy the commodity, which appears at first sight a very trivial thing, and easily understood, yet which is in reality a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties.

HERE WE HAVE the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by things whose qualities are “at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.” This principle is absolutely fulfilled in the spectacle, where the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that are superior to that world yet at the same time impose themselves as eminently perceptible….

click on image for more:The range of violent bodily gestures is performed in slow motion and is devoid of fear or pain, as if partaking of a symbolic performance or ritual. This is a simulacrum of sterilized violence that has been stripped of a motive, of emotions and of any vestiges of material existence in favor of a perfect composition produced by 3D technology. It seems that in this work, the AES+F members have distilled their "aesthetics of violence" to its most powerful essence, processing it into a climactic futuristic display suffused with pathos and eroticism.---

THE WORLD THE SPECTACLE holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is, for its logic is one with men’s estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what they produce. Read More:http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/tsots02.html

ADDENDUM:
TAN: What is it about mannerism and the Baroque that appeals to you?AES+F: We feel that contemporary visual culture is very similar to that of the Baroque: everything is extremely expressive, figurative and very visual and founded on images and at the same time very decadent. We try to make it seductive but when you make it too beautiful it begins to be ugly so we are also trying to establish the border between ugliness and beauty. It is also not clear who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and it is very important to us that it should not be clear….

…TAN: Another work that you are showing for the first time is Europe-Europe, a series of porcelain figurines in the 18th-century style of amorous couples. But instead of presenting frolicking shepherds and shepherdesses, you depict more controversial contemporary couplings: a skinhead and a Turkish girl, a blonde female police officer in full riot gear undressing for an Arab teenager, a western manager and three Chinese toy factory workers—what is the intention of this piece?AES+F: This is generally a very interesting question for us, what is Europe now? And what is so-called multiculturalism? The task was to put some questions about contemporary European identity and so we made this kind of impossible utopia—and the question is, can these communities live together culturally, or not? So we wanted to present this utopia of possibility, this idyllic situation. Read More:http://artradarjournal.com/2008/08/01/russian-collective-aesf-talk-to-the-art-newspaper-about-their-meteoric-success-over-the-last-year/
—————————————————–
Most central to Benjamin’s project is the critique of allegory, understood as a real religious position. In a surrealistic manner his position is close to the Cabalistic, lacking a positive religious faith. His pessimism discloses the presence of violent conflict between two tendencies: a positive optimistic utopian tendency and a pessimistic – the latter culminating in a negative utopianism and merging… His pessimism discloses the presence of violence within the continuity of “the whole time everything is the same” as a cosmic fate, a fate grounded in mystic necessity. He regards reality as essentially tragic, jet not as a partial historical stage or as an accident, but as normality itself. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’, in which we live is not an exception, but a rule.” The fact that “everything continues as usual” is the eternal “catastrophe,” which according to Benjamin discloses the boundless dominance of the mythical. This is the basis of the “Kafka-like situation,” which determines the subject as described in the article “Franz Kafka.” The “original sin” makes itself present at each moment in history, and according to Benjamin it turns out to be a reaction to the subject’s being a victim of cosmic injustice permanently directed against him. Read More:http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/Utopia4.html

This entry was posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media, Miscellaneous, Modern Arts/Craft and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>