New Rave Aesthetic

Marie Antoinette (US 2006 Sofia Coppola) got me thinking about the correlations between sound and image, and how fashion aesthetics are often deliberately linked with or directly associated with musical movements. 

In the 1980s for example, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ensured that their punk fashion aesthetic (which was ironically incredibly expensive and in this regard completely antithetical to the punk movement) was associated with the music of the Sex Pistols. (McLaren was managing the Sex Pistols – a nice fusion of goals).

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From Westwood’s fashion collection from 1976-1980:

 

Text from the V&A Museum in London (which held a retrospective of Westwood’s work in 2004, which travelled to Australia – NGA, Canberra - in January 2005): “McLaren was now manager of the Sex Pistols and a key figure in the emerging Punk Rock phenomenon. The Seditionaries collection was an audacious fusion of all the subversive elements in Westwood and McLaren’s recent work. There were the ripped garments of 1950s pin-ups; the leather, chains and badges of the bikers; the straps and buckles of the fetishists. As Westwood said, ‘You couldn’t imagine the Punk Rock thing without the clothing.”

More recently, the Klaxons jokingly referred to their aesthetic as “new rave”, unwittingly spawning a huge following and coining a phrase to describe this new aesthetic that again straddles the (increasingly slim in some regards) divide between music and fashion.

The Klaxons provide this archetypal example of their “new rave” aesthetic in this film clip for their song “Atlantis to Interzone“. Here’s another example of their work that has a number of references to Vivienne Westwood’s early work – all black imitation-leather and faux buckles etc.

Arguably, New Young Pony Club have contributed one of the best other example’s to the genre with this video for their song “Ice Cream“. The first 40 seconds of this clip are sublime. The eroticisation, the gaudy colour scheme – all fluro and pastel complimentary and clashing colours, and the use of sugary sweet garish coloured foodstuffs reminds me very much of  Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. The great thing about New Young Pony Club is that this clip pushes the aesthetic to into the realm kitsch – its a licorice all-sorts look.

the boss of it all

The Boss of it All (Danish 2006 Lars Von Trier) is the funniest film I have seen this year. Its wonderfully silly, eccentric and self-referential.

 http://www.direktorenfordethele.dk/index_uk.html

Mapping the architecture of the interior: Giuliana Bruno on Louise Bourgeois

 

“A window on the architecture of living opens with a paradigmatic series of paintings and drawings made by Louise Bourgeois, beginning in the early 1940s. Called Femme-Maison, they represent a woman in the shape of a house. In this “architexture,” the body and the house are joined in the itinerary of dwelling. In exposing this link, Bourgeois designs a haptic map of inhabitation , questioning what domus means for the female subject. Her work on architecturechallenges the long-standing association of domus with gender fixity. Instead, the drawings suggest that a woman can conceive of home as something other than an enclosed, and enclosing, world. She can opt for a “travelling domestic,” remapping herself in different notions of home. Here, this location is grounds of departure.

…This vision of emotion inspires us to consider the relation of voyage and dwelling, in order to see how sexual difference can be housed differently. To look architecturally, and with geographical eyes, at the relation of private to public space can advance former notions of gender identity based on psychoanalytically oriented feminist theory. This outlook enables us to incorporate the diversity of cultural landscapes into our forms of urban dwelling. It can lead us to understand sexual difference in terms of space – as a geography of negotiated terrains. Thinking geographically, we can design different cultural maps as we venture into the terrain of an architectonics of gender – a lived space.”

- Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy – Architecture and the Visual Arts, (MIT Press, Cambridge and London: 2007), p163-5.

  

Chechnya & Virilio’s Anthropophagic Aesthetic

There are an enormous number of videos on YouTube if  you simply type in “Chechnya“.

Chechnya: Battle of Grozny is rather incredible; at 0.31secs there is a shot of an endless stream of armoured military vehicles that is eerily reminiscent of the opening scene in 4 (Russia, 2005, Ilya Khrzhanovsky) where the street sweepers fill the screen, or indeed one of the closing scenes, in which the military troop-carrier planes take off the runway. A grim, gritty, militarized vision. Further on  in this YouTube video it depicts the pitch battles in the streets of Grozny – a scene of utter destruction.  Little wonder that  the United Nations listed Grozny top of the list of destroyed cities just several years ago…

aiding and abetting

At what point are you morally culpable for continuing to conduct business with a morally bankrupt regime?

- banks…see this article on Suing Hitler’s Willing Business Partners
- arms dealers…

- large corporations…

- energy companies (oil companies)…

- nations
Burma, Afghanistan, North Korea, Zimbabwe…

Dark, Murky Blackwater

I am fascinated by the outsourcing and privitization of military work and the creation of private military labour forces – so called “private military contractors”, a.k.a. mercenaries.

“A US human rights group says it is suing private security firm Blackwater for unspecified damages for war crimes and wrongfully killing Iraqi civilians.” See this BBC News report

Blackwater has been getting some bad press recently.

We shall wait and see what the outcomes of the proposed legal action is…

The Ultimate Quarry

October 7th was the first anniversary of the death of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder. Although the circumstances of her death remain unclear, it appears she was assassinated for her fearless stance on reporting the atrocities committed by the Russian army acting under Kremlin policy in Chechnya.I have been reading ABC journalist Eric Campbell’s insightful memoirs, Absurdistan, which detail his time as a foreign correspondent based in Moscow for the ABC. Campbell describes a couple of his visits to Grozny, Chechnya, in which he witneesed the devastation, brutality and senselessness first hand:

“The armoured personnel carrier (APC) blocked the sun as it sped up to pass us. Five Russian soldiers bristling with guns sat on the roof. It was too good a shot too muss and Tim [the cameraman] shifted his camera to the car window, discreetly filming as they overtook us. I saw a solder at the back of the APC notice Tim. He called to his commander who turned to see the camera. I thought he might shout at us to stop filming. Instead, he raised his machine gun and opened fire. There was a deafening blast of rapid fire about a metre from the windscreen. Our Chechen driver slammed on the brakes and skidded off the road. In the long silence before anyone spoke, all I could hear was a ringing in my ears and my heart pounding. I felt stunned by what just happened…The driver smiled mockingly, as if to say, ‘Welcome to Chechnya’.”

 

Campbell also observes the presence of Russian mercenaries:

 

“…Further down the road we came across a group of Russian soldiers who were every bit as ruthless as the guerillas. They were kontraktniki, low-grade mercenaries who had signed up to fight in Chechnya for $50 a month, some because they needed the money and others for the chance to kill. A few of them had shaved their heads and painted camouflage greens and black on their faces. Their Russian uniforms had touches of Rambo action movies – bandanas, tight black singlets, hunting knives strapped to their legs. Another correspondent had advised us to bring alcohol, Marlboro cigarettes and pornographic magazines to ensure our passage to Grozny. It took us most of that, plus the use of our satphone, before they would let us pass.”

 

Personally, I cannot fathom why anyone would want to put themselves in such a position. But this reminded me of Paul Virilio’s discussion from our course reader [Virilio, “Chapter 4”, Strategy of Deception, 2000] in which he describes the “great world urban wasteland and theorizes that contemporary war zones produce an anthropophagic aesthetic which enables the human participants in these conflicts to become viewed as an economic resource to be mined:

 

‘…the other will no longer be considered as an alter ego, nor even as a potential enemy (with whom reconciliation is always possible), but as the ultimate quarry.’

 

On his following visit to Grozny in January 1997, Campbell pinpointed another issue that Chechnya, like any country destroyed by war, was facing in its attempts to sustain peace and return to civility: when a large percentage of the male population have become accustomed to a bloody and violent existence of guerrilla warfare, what do they do once the fighting stops?

 

Campbell observes:

“The main problem for the local economy – apart from the fact that almost every town and village had been shot up and bombed – was that there was no work for the gunmen. Tens of thousands of heavily armed fighters, whose main job skill was killing Russians, milled around the streets with their weapons, looking for something to do. A group of fighters came up to us to ask about opportunities in the West. The commander wanted to know if there was any work for fighters in Hawaii.”

 
This sort of mercenary mentality is understandable – not justifiable, but certainly understandable – when a person has become accustomed to a certain mode of existence: that of a guerilla fighter.

land labour capital

http://www.hrw.org/photos/2006/uae1106/

Casuistry

“Casuistry is a broad term that refers to a variety of forms of case-based reasoning. Used in discussions of law and ethics, casuistry is often understood as a critique of a strict principle-based approach to reasoning. For example, while a principle-based approach may conclude that lying is always morally wrong, the casuist would argue that lying may or may not be wrong, depending on the details surrounding the case. For instance, the casuist might conclude that a person is wrong to lie while giving legal testimony under oath, but (the casuist might argue) lying is actually the best moral choice if the lie saves someone’s life. For the casuist, the circumstances surrounding a particular case are essential for evaluating the proper response.”

See this article on wikipedia.