Be sure to check out Popular Unrest , too.

Philippe Parreno, No More Reality (the demonstration), 1991

His “Raw Cuts” are my favorite serial releases in quite a while, absolute and total destruction. (Thanks, Nate.)

Richard Jackson:
Red Room/Green Room
June 27- August 22
Opening: June 26, 7-9 PM

A rare US exhibition of a never-before-seen installation by Richard Jackson. For Red Room/Green Room, Jackson has constructed two separate spaces, each of which is painted one of the colors in the exhibition title.

The Armory Center for the Arts
Pasadena Art Alliance Gallery
145 North Raymond Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91103

Ghana vs Czech Republic (2006 World Cup)

John Baldessari is one of the most influential American artists working today. This long overdue retrospective will feature more than 150 works spanning the artist’s career from 1962 to the present day, and include works on canvas, photography, videos and artist’s books. Baldessari’s text and image paintings from the mid-1960s are widely recognized as among the earliest examples of Conceptual Art, while his 1980s photo compositions derived from film stills rank as pivotal to the development of appropriation art and other practices that address the social and cultural impact of mass culture. Throughout and continuing today, Baldessari’s interest in language, both written and visual, raises questions about the nature of communication. The exhibition is curated by LACMA’s Leslie Jones, Prints and Drawings, with Jessica Morgan, Contemporary Art, at Tate Modern. It will also feature a special installation conceived just for this retrospective.

Golden Sounds’ 1986 hit Zamina (Waka Waka, time for Africa)

From the first 2010 World Cup broadcasts on ESPN, my fellow tweeters cracked jokes about The Lion King. We imagined Rafiki calling the matches, or James Earl Jones (who provided the voice for Mufasa), and half expected the referees to raise the Jabulani aloft to announce the arrival of the New Ball. Most folks simply observed, “I feel like I am watching The Lion King.”

There is a good reason for this. The score used by ESPN to frame its broadcasts was written by Lisle Moore, a Utah composer who had worked with the network in the past. Moore gave us muscular music for a sporting event, upbeat music for a media event organized around putting us all in the mood to buy a shirt, a ball, or a Coke. Layered over the orchestral swells are the oddly familiar sounds of African voices, or, I should say, African-sounding voices. Africa is scored here as a noble landscape, peopled by a unified chorus, singing together in a harmonic convergence of tribal cultures.

“With the exception of the African choir,” reports the Salt Lake Tribune, “all of the music is performed by Utah musicians.” (”ESPN Turns to Utah for World Cup Music”) That African choir, lending this score a sense of location, is actually made up with members of The Lion King’s Broadway cast. The African-sounding choir from New York City was hired to sonically channel an idea of African authenticity keyed to ESPN’s American audience. This is of course true of all scores produced by the World Cup broadcasting networks as they reach for music their imagined audience will understand. Without a doubt, we are hearing not African music but (to invoke philosopher Valentin Mudimbe) a musical “Idea of Africa.”

In the mix of the music draped over the 2010 World Cup, are more specific strains - signals clearly audible to the listener of African music, the sound of a continent being ripped off. This is nowhere more obvious than “The Official 2010 FIFA World Cup ™ Song”, “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”, sung by Shakira and Freshlyground, a South African Afro-fusion bad. The global pop hit has a clear relationship to a Cameroonian military song, Zangaléwa, popularized by Golden Sounds in 1986. “Waka Waka” doesn’t just borrow from “Zangaléwa” - listen to the two and you see that “Waka Waka” is, very nearly, an illegal cover (the chorus is a direct use of “Zangaléwa).

continue reading…

“If you’re one of the many people who has their homepage set to www.thedailynice.com you are already convert to photographer Jason Evans’s online project. Each day a new ‘nice’ appears – an image shot by Evans and uploaded the night before – popping up on your screen, staying for 24 hours and then disappearing, never to return…Now Evans, together with photography curator Benedict Burbridge, has made a real-world version of the Daily Nice. All this week (until Sun 23) the Kunsthaus Essen in Germany has been hosting The Daily Takeaway. The exhibition consists of a stack of printed nices, which visitors to the gallery can pick up and walk away with. It furthers the project’s narrative of interactivity and value judgements about the medium photography (especially photography that is displayed in galleries), while also sounding like jolly good fun.”

Before the start of their 2006 World Cup semi-final, players for Brazil and France stood together and held a banner declaring “Say no to racism”. The gesture was part of a Fifa campaign — each of the 64 matches included a visible statement against the racist abuse directed especially at black players in Europe. From the round banner marked with this slogan which covered the centre circle until the start of the match, to pre-game statements read by team captains before kick-off, during Fifa’s 2006 World Cup, players, fans and tournament organisers declared that racism has no place in football.

Imagine a similar intervention today. South Africa has the highest incidence of rape in the world. The statistics are chilling: one in two women are raped; women are more likely to be raped than to learn to read; and they have little reason to trust the law to defend their right to their own bodies.

One grisly dimension of this crisis is that black lesbians are singled out for homophobic rape and violent assault with particular frequency. In April 2008, Eudy Simelane, a former midfielder for South Africa’s women’s national team, was raped, beaten, stabbed and left to die in a creek 200m from her home. A shocking number of South African female athletes have been assaulted — women who dare to play a “man’s game” become visible targets.

continue reading…

Tan Lin’s latest book Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking: [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] is now available from Wesleyan University Press. I also strongly recommend his essay Disco As An Operating System.

This is my first post on Tagbanger. Thank you Harsh for the recommendation + Jonathan for the invite.

Paper Surrogate by Anthony Lepore for Works Sited.

June 15 - August 22, 2010

Reception today from 6-8pm @ Central Library.

Using photographs, wood and plastic, Lepore has created a quarter-scaled replica of the library’s display case housed within the original. This smaller edition contains a photographic snapshot of an arrangement of books that either deal directly with subjects of expectancy, birth and parenthood or have titles that invoke these themes despite their actual contents. Using a diverse selection of library books from a wide range of topics, Lepore frames how such complex and abstract phenomena – that of birth and procreation – have been embedded in today’s social and cultural imaginary.

Art, Music & Recreation Dept, 2nd Floor
Central Los Angeles Public Library
630 W Fifth St
Los Angeles, CA 90071

Hours: M, W 10-6; T, Th 10-8; Fri, Sat 10-6
Parking available in lot on Flower between 5th and 6th streets

For my first Tagbanger post, I’d like to pay tribute to Chicagoland (despite having left 14 years ago). Here’s Naked Raygun, representing everything great and weird about the Midwest. Thanks for the invitation, Jonathan!

Photographers have been enticed by the subject of food since the earliest years of the medium. Drawn exclusively from the Museum’s collection, this selection of more than 20 works highlights important technological and aesthetic developments, including bountiful still life compositions, innovative close-ups and photograms, and documentary studies. Among the photographers featured are Roger Fenton, Adolphe Braun, Edward Weston, Bill Owens, Martin Parr, and Taryn Simon.

Event information + LA Times article

The Getty Center
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90049
Apr 6, 2010 (Tuesday) to Aug 22, 2010 (Sunday)

Video interview of Rupert Parkes, Photek in his home studio in 1996. Related videos in the series have footage of Source Direct while they were 20 years old in parents basement studio and squarepusher.

ARE WE HAVING FUN YET!?
W/ STAND UP COMEDY

JUNE 10-27 2010
FOR HOURS, CHECK
WITHNYC.ORG

OPENING RECEPTION/
!?!??!?!!?!?!?!!?!?
THURSDAY JUNE 10, 2010
7:30-9:30PM
SPONSORED BY
PABST BLUE RIBBON

- - - - - - -
W/ ———––
141 Division Street
New York NY 10002

Opening June 10th at W/—, “APPLAUSE COPYRIGHT © 1966 BY BRUCE CONNOR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED” is revisited by Stand Up Comedy. Focusing on one signal, the installation is a relic made to fit the confines of the project site. W/— as a place for entertainments and openings as recreation, or objects as performance. The audience will often define the space.

Sad to hear of the recent passing of New York designer Tobias Wong. I often referred students to his clever takes on everyday objects and conceptual approach to product design. A personal favorite was his a desktop pad of dollar bills glued on one edge.

An interview is here.

Marcelo Gomes, Exploding, Still
3 June — 2 July 2010
Opening Reception, Thursday, 3 June, 7-10pm
Performance by Secret Circuit
Free

Season 2 gets started later this month come check out the results of season 1