"Marcelo G. Lima—Postcards from the Aesthetic Diaspora"

J.R. Osborn

'This is a historical lab, Dubai. The city of the permanent diaspora.’

- M.G. Lima

For over five years, Marcelo Guimarães Lima has been living and teaching in Dubai, a perplexingly global city populated by an expatriate majority. In 2007, he began sharing his aesthetic and critical observations online via the ‘Panoptikon’ (www.panoptikon.net). As Dubai’s glittering skyscrapers stretched towards the sky, he kept his feet firmly planted on the ground: drawing lines and sketching figures that connect the frenzied project of globalized development with the contemporary experience of artistic production. 

 Heterochronia and Vanishing Viewpoints:
Art Chronicles and Essays
by Marcelo Guimarães Lima
published by
Metasenta Publications,
Melbourne, 2012.

Dr. Lima’s observations remind us that questions of Dubai’s modernity are also aesthetic questions. Between the rise and fall of economic and political fortunes—the meteoric rise of Dubai as a bourgeois playground, the global economic crash, a wave of social network revolutions—art persists on its own pace. The autonomy of art modulates a timeframe in which the artifact and observer circle one another with shared subjectivity. As a city of monuments that briefly sat atop the world’s imagination, Dubai locates the riddle. But its reflections are global.


The following collection travels smoothly from Latin America to Europe through Australia and beyond. These are not centralized dictates from the panopticon but scattered glimpses of the panopticon core. These multiple reflections on artistic communication point us toward a shared experience of imagination, possibility, and aesthetic sensibility. Through a continual process of looking inward, the diasporic position connects the dots and new figures emerge. Although the ball may move across the center of the field, the sidelines offer the best vantage point from which to observe the beautiful game.


Near the center of this collection, Dr. Lima introduces imagination as the common faculty of art and science. Both processes shape our sensory inputs into a string of signification. Signification here is both informative and constructive; it is transformative as well as enlightening. Dr. Lima is particularly interested in artistic signification as ‘the creation of the experience of possibility.’ His essays demonstrate that the viewing of art can be an experience of the possible.

“From now on all art will be Mimetic again, or will not be!”

— Pierre Menard

It is here that we may glimpse a ‘theory of art’ that resonates across the text (presuming, that is, that such grand claims can still be made, much less voiced from the outskirts). As touristic flâneurs, Dr. Lima guides us from the Italian Renaissance through the graffiti- pocked streets of São Paulo; from the gold mines of 1920s Peru into the gold-plated fixtures and crystal chandeliers of Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace; from visualizations of twenty-first century data to political challenges contra 1980s conservatism. We leave the baroque halls of the Louvre and step into the bustling noise of a modern day traffic circle. Circling the intersection of advertising and public art, signs point toward the shifting gaze of Emirati painting, the vistas of photographic surrealism, the liberatory vision of a cyborg transhumanism, and the silent echoes of Japanese calligraphy. Choosing an exit at random, we return to a darkened chamber, decorated with the aesthetic SCRAPS of industrial Dubai.


This book freezes a shifting environment; it materially remediates the online Panoptikon series. These writings appeared in digital form during the period of 2008-2011. The blog posts were linked to other sites, re-linked from other sites, and embellished by commentsand user input. As digital entities, they continue to shift and evolve in a networked ecology. Yet, it is fitting that they also gain new life, and a new temporal presence, in book form. The book is a curious artifact: historically significant, temporally experienced, radically memorable, prematurely pronounced dead, refreshed, reissued, and persistently stubborn in its resurrection. Like works of art, books communicate autonomously from the external passage of time. The book provides a material portal into moving currents of signification which are paradoxically bounded from the world in which the artifact dwells and circulates. As a curatorial collection, this book isolates its contents from the flows of networked information and organizes them in a visual array. As a gallery of informational art, it allows us to view the displayed works side by side. The juxtaposition introduces us to the themes and palette with which Dr. Lima works.


As we flip these pages, we enter his experience of possibility. We are displaced through new sensibilities of artistic communication and hetero-synchronous time. Dr. Lima has sent us an invitation to join him in the permanent diaspora. These works are the Derridean postcards of an aesthetic dérive. They imitate and remediate artistic discovery. In doing so, they also record a global journey upon which we have recently (or long ago) embarked and which the possible destinations are yet to be imagined.

J.R. Osborn is an experimentalist and scholar of communication. His research focuses on design aesthetics, media technologies, and the visual culture of the Middle East and Africa. Dr. Osborn holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego and is currently a professor in the Communication, Culture & Technology program at Georgetown University.

The above text is the introduction to the volume Heterochronia and Vanishing Viewpoints: Art Chronicles and Essays by Marcelo Guimarães Lima published by Metasenta Publications, Melbourne, 2012. 

(read the Brazilian Portuguese translation here: MALAZARTES)

METASENTA PUBLICATIONS 

International Drawing Fair 2012: the finalists

http://onlinefid.com/finalists/

FID (Foire Internationale du Dessin / International Drawing Fair, Paris) has been discovering and promoting the careers of young artists since 2007. In 2011 this International Drawing Fair welcomed participants from 22 countries. In 2012, 27 countries are taking part. As is the rule since 2009, the hundreds of applications to exhibit at this fourth edition of FID were reviewed by an international jury of recognised contemporary art experts and drawing specialists. Its vote has produced the following shortlist of 96 independent young artists.

In a few days’ time, the jury will vote again to select the 25 exhibitors at FID 2012.

100 drawings for the future

“Components“ at „Projekt Social Media“

Exhibition opening on the 11th May 2012, 7 p.m.
Galerie Farbenklang in Sankt Pölten/Austria

  

The time has come: „Components“ is coming together.  190 creative minds of the world of social media create an installation of 5 meter length at the  „Galerie Farbenklang“ in Austria.  Thank you very much for all your contributions, your support and motivation.

See you soon!

Simone Naumann,  project director

Unsolicited Criticism - allotrope 04 - Call for submissions

allotrope 04

Call for submissions:

Unsolicited Criticism

Guest editor: Sarah McAvera

Do you feel that reviews have become overly descriptive and lacking in criticality? Would you like to unleash your inner critic?

The Unsolicited Criticism edition of Allotrope invites you to  write the review that you feel should have been written about an exhibition, performance, event or body of work.

Submissions should be no longer than 500 words (please note that your submission may be edited) and any accompanying images should be in JPEG or tiff format at 300dpi.

Submissions should be sent to allotropepress@gmail.com  by 22nd May 2012.


About our guest editor:

Sarah McAvera enjoys engaging critical thinking in a number of areas, including writing, curating and facilitating. She currently works for the Golden Thread Gallery as Exhibitions Officer, she was a founding member of the Untitled Arts Group and continues to act as a free-lance arts facilitator, curator and writer. 
                   
She has facilitated numerous exhibitions at local, national and international levels. Her current position includes the organisation of exhibitions, securing funding, representing artists and representing the organisation.She has written for many arts magazines, including the Irish Arts Review, State of Art, Circa and Cura.

www.allotropepress.com

"Glitter Dust: finding art in Dubai" interview with Katy Chang and J R Osborn

Glitter Dust - interview with Katy Chang and J R Osborn from panoptikon on Vimeo.

The documentary "Glitter Dust: finding art in Dubai" by Katy Chang and J R Osborn was presented at the Gulf Film Festival in April 2012. This interview was recorded on April 16, 2012 at Festival City in Dubay.

panoptikon.net
glitterdustfilm.com

Songs of Pleasure and Pain: Music and Art to Protest by.

Dr Suzanne Albanus 

                 

Introduction

Protest songs are music which is usually associated with movements for social change and are classed along with the broader category of topical songs connected to current events.  The music may be classed as folk, classical or commercial in genre. Among social movements that have an associated body of songs that accompany them are ; the abolition movement, women’s suffrage, civil rights, The Great Depression, feminist and animal rights movements, vegetarianism,  and latterly the Arab revolution of 2011 (Gulf News, June 25,2011).[i]

Protest songs are often situational, having been associated with a social movement through context. The song “Goodnight Irene” is recognized as a protest song because it was written by the US African American singer Lead belly who was a convict and social outcast. Protest songs have significant cognitive content although the sociologist R. Serge Denisoff saw them as narrow in terms of their function but he ignored the premise that there is more to music and movements than can be captured in a functional perspective. The role and place of music needs to be placed within a broader framework in which “tradition and ritual are understood as processes of identity and identification, as encoded and embodied forms of collective meaning and memory” (Eyerman & Jamison: 1998 p.43-44).

                  
                             African and Arabic Protest Songs

Rai (Arabic راي) which is the Arabic word for “opinion” is a form of folk music, originating from Oran, Algeria, in particular used by Bedouin shepherds. It is mixed with Spanish, French, African and Arabic musical forms, which dates back to the 1930’s and primarily evolved from the women in the culture. Rai has been forbidden music in Algeria to the point of one popular singer being assassinated, although since the 1980’s it has enjoyed considerable success.  The song “Parisien Du Nord” by Cheb Mami is a recent example of how the genre has been used as a form of protest, as the song was written as a protest against the racial tensions that sparked the 2005 French riots.

                  Palestinian Music (Arabic: حشمثسفهىهشى ةعسهؤ) deals with the conflict with Israel, the longing for peace, and the love of the Palestinian’s for their land. Such an example is the song “Biladi, Biladi” (My Country, My Country) which has become the official Palestinian national anthem. DAM is an Arabic hip-hop group, rapping in Arabic and Hebrew about the Palestinians under occupation and calling for change. [ii]

                  Unlike during the Anti-apartheid era, international artists have largely avoided the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as lyrical fodder. Since 2000, this has largely changed with the Electronic Intifada co-founder Nigel Parry’s album of 2001, “This Side of Paradise”, T with the lyrics primarily noted within the hip-hop community.

Rap inherits the protest mantle.

                  Soul music which carried over into the early part of the 1970’s in many ways taking over from folk music as of the of the strongest voices of protest in American music. A hugely influential protest album of the time was Gil Scott-Herron’s “Small Talk at 125^th and Lenox” which contained the often referenced protest song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, dealing with themes such as mass consumerism, the superficiality of television, inner city resident’s difficulties and the like.  The rise of hip-hop and rap by bands such as Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy used this genre of music to vehemently protest the discrimination, violence and poverty in Black communities. Modern day mainstream artists   to have written ant-war protest songs in the US range from Pink singing “Dear Mr President” to Bright Eyes with “When the President Talks to God”. [iii]) Green Day’s 2004 album “American Idiot” contains several anti- Bush songs and the song” Holiday” is a stance against the war in Iraq. Arcade Fire’s 2007 “Neon Bible” contains many oblique references against the paranoia of a contemporary America under attack by “terrorists”. However the protest song that still resonates now as much as it did when it was first released is Green Day’s “American Idiot”.  It achieved mainstream success of a type rare to protest music and is seen as a public statement in reaction to the confusing and warped scene that is American pop culture since 9/11. Even rapper Eminem has released songs which target the American government. [iv]

Glastonbury – socialism with a small”s”.

                  Glastonbury (or Glasto as it is known colloquially) has been political since its inception in 1970.  In 1971, David Bowie and Hawk Wind endorsed a manifesto decrying environmental pollution. [v] Within a few years the event was donating to charity, but it was not until the 1980’s when Glastonbury was under attack from the Thatcher Government, that things became more political. The 1981 event was used to raise funds for the ant-nuclear movement with Bono of U2 making his first appearance. Donations are still made to Oxfam, Greenpeace and Water Aid.  Glastonbury 2011 still reflects what matters most to people varying from prohibiting wild animals in circuses to opposition to the governments cuts in budget. Bob Wilson, events manager for Greenpeace, said that the festival has not lost the ethic which underpinned the first gathering in 1970.  Glastonbury has always been a festival with a conscience and even though not everyone shares the same outlook, it is this conscience that sets it apart from others. [vi]

Minstrels of the Arab Revolution.

                  Tracy Chapman’s song “Talkin ‘bout a Revolution” (1968), is being played now on Tunisian radio in recent months to a whole new audience not likely envisaged by Chapman when she released her song. Similar to Chapman, Dylan et al, in the current wave of revolutions and political upheavals in the Arab world, citizens are voicing their demands for change using music as their instrument.[vii] People from Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and the rest of the world have taken on the role of today’s minstrels as they become You Tube and Internet heroes for their powerful and encouraging lyrics. “Zenga Zenga” is one such song that became popular with the Libyan opposition as a parody of Muammar Gaddafi, despite it being created by Noy Aloashe, who is an Israeli journalist and musician.

                  One of the first protesters and rebel fighters to use their music to fight for the Jasmine Revolution is Libyan guitarist, Masoud Abu Assir. Although the rest of the 38 year-old’s band is separated now, he has been singing and performing for the rebels in the battlefield in support of Libya’s revolution “We Rebels”. We come from the East. We are determined to do what we want” is one of his motivational lyrics. [viii]  Emel Mathlouthi, a Tunisian musician who asks for equality in her native country, states that; ”The morphine we’ve been injected with for 23 years is no longer enough to dull our pain”. She has said that she always looked up to Bob Dylan the most out of many singers and considers him to be her idol. [ix]

                  Mathlouthi’s songs express the grief, pain and sorrow the Tunisian people have experienced. She and many other Arab singers of this current revolution are using their music (rap, folk or other) to deliver their message. Their hopes are similar to all those who have used this genre through the ages – that the music will be an influence for change and a record of people’s lives, hopes and dreams. Protest music is, above all else, about the expression of a collective desire as well as passion, identity and the legacy of the times being sung about. The argument about cultural boycotts such as the one imposed on South Africa during Apartheid, continues to this day. Artistic exchange is works differently from the trade of goods, having more subtle effects and can have unpredictable outcomes. Absence of culture is a deprivation, but cultural dialogue opens hearts and minds in ways that governments cannot predict. Music exchanges in this regard can make a powerful point, gently.[x]

African Griots and Rapping.

                  What is known as the Hip Hop culture cannot be studied without examining other major parts of this sub-culture. Hip-Hop culture was also comprised of graffiti, break dancing and the attitude and dress of the people who subscribed to the mores and traditions of this sub-culture. Steven Hager commented on these aspects in his book on Adventures in the Counterculture: From Hip-Hop to High Times[xi].  The commencement of projects in the Bronx moved the middle class residents out and poorer, unemployed families began to move in.  Overnight, street gangs began to appear on every corner, with one gang, the Black Spades becoming notorious for its exploits. One legacy of the gangs which affected Hip-hop culture was graffiti. Both forms were used not only to mark territory, but to voice a protest at the extent to which violence, poverty, drugs and prison, affected lives in the “hood”[xii]. Hip-Hop, like graffiti, later moved to topics such as pleading for an end to the arms race. The assumptions that rap music and graffiti emerged from the same culture is correct with many graffiti artists going on to record rap records and play an influential role in its development. Three key elements that transferred across the genres were style, clothing and name tagging[xiii]. One of the most notable artists to emerge from this time was Keith Haring, who began to produce the graffiti art for which he became famous for – white chalk on black tar paper which was used to cover un-renewed poster ads in the subway[xiv]. It wasn’t unusual for Haring’s work to go untouched in the subway system because his work was so admired.

Ashekman, a hip-hop Lebanese duo composed of twin brothers Omar and Mohamed Kabbani

Conclusion

                  Protest music could be said to be enjoying something of a renaissance, due in part to the Arab spring, yet it can also be said that throughout history it has never really gone away.  The music itself has traction because it communicates a sense of the particular with a sense of the universal. People can connect to the topics or characters being sung about regardless of the era or generation.  Regardless of controversy, it is the participatory elements and the sense of community that allows this genre of music to speak to all people down through the years.

                                   

 Notes

---

[i] http://gulfnews.com/news/minstrels-of-the-arab-revolution-1.827081  June25, 2011.

[ii] http://cdbaby.com/aribenyam

[iii] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt6V4jhAyFM

[iv] Ibid.

[v] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/16/massoud-abu-assir-libyan-rebel-guitarist-_n_850100.html

[vi] http://www.songandcity.com/2011/01/voice-from-tunisian-demonstrations-emel.html

[vii] http://gulfnews.com/news/minstrels-of-the-arab-revolution-1.827081 June25, 2011.

[viii] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/16/massoud-abu-assir-libyan-rebel-guitarist-_n_850100.html

[ix] http://www.songandcity.com/2011/01/voice-from-tunisian-demonstrations-emel.html

[x] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/bc70acc2-7362-11e1-9014-00144feab49a.html#axzz1qCmtDdu3

[xi] http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1993/4/93.04.04.x.html

[xii] http://www.popartuk.com/music/rap-gods/hip-hop-rap-gods-1332-poster.asp

[xiii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Darra_j_berlin_retouched.jpg

[xiv] http://rebelrebelantistyle.blogspot.com/2012/03/keith-haring-19781982-at-brooklyn.html

Bibliography

Eyerman, R. & Jamison, A. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing tradition in the Twentieth Century.

Cambridge UK, 1998.

Hager, S. Adventures in the Counterculture: From Hip-Hop to High Times. High Times Books, NY. 2002.

Dr Suzanne Albanus is a designer who was formerly a lecturer at James Cook University, QLD, Australia. She is currently an Academic Advisor at the American University in Dubai, UAE.

salbanus@aud.edu

GLITTER DUST at The Gulf Film Festival, Dubai 2012 : screening schedule

GLITTER DUST:FINDING ART IN DUBAI.

 at the Grand Festival Cinemas in Dubai Festival City

April 11th, 2012                     6:15:00 PM                 Grand Cinema 9

 April 13th, 2012                     9:30:00 PM                 Grand Cinema 10

The documentary feature GLITTER DUST: FINDING ART IN DUBAI follows the city's cultural capital. Three artists come to terms with truth and artificiality. 

Glitter Dust: Finding Art in Dubai

Documentary

www.glitterdustfilm.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/glitterdustfilm

Twitter: @artindubai (www.twitter.com/artindubai)

Runtime: 63 minutes

Director: Katy Chang

Producer/Editor: J.R. Osborn

Original Music: Ben Bracken

Sound: Drew Kennedy

Arabic: http://www.gulffilmfest.com/index.php/ar 

English: http://www.gulffilmfest.com/index.php/en

Wissam Shawkat: Contemporary Arabic Calligraphy at AUD

April 9th

VISUAL COMMUNICATION DEPARTMENT GALLERY

Building A
American University in Dubai

GLITTER DUST at the Gulf Film Festival 2012

GLITTER DUST: FINDING ART IN DUBAI will have its premiere at the Gulf Film Festival in Dubai, United Arab Emirates from April 10-16, 2012. The final screening schedule will be announced soon, with a Q&A session from the filmmakers.

Screening times and locations will also be posted on the Gulf Film Festival website

Arabic: http://www.gulffilmfest.com/index.php/ar/

English: http://www.gulffilmfest.com/index.php/en

The documentary feature GLITTER DUST: FINDING ART IN DUBAI follows the city's cultural capital. Three artists come to terms with truth and artificiality. Delightful hand-drawn animations interplay with live footage; art and life are truly intertwined. In turns funny and poignant, this documentary explores the artists behind the flash of Dubai. The idea of a “drawcumentary” came from the doodles in director Katy Chang’s journal and a feeling that no realistic camera image could accurately capture the surrealism of the city. The free form, playful animations comment on the objective viewpoint of the film and visually disrupt the footage in order to emphasize the dislocation of the city’s migrant population.

Film Information:

Glitter Dust: Finding Art in Dubai

Documentary

www.glitterdustfilm.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/glitterdustfilm

Twitter: @artindubai (www.twitter.com/artindubai)

Runtime: 63 minutes

Director: Katy Chang

Producer/Editor: J.R. Osborn

Original Music: Ben Bracken

Sound: Drew Kennedy

For more information, please contact J.R. Osborn at whosborn@gmail.com
or online at www.glitterdustfilm.com;

on Facebook at www.facebook.com/glitterdustfilm;

on Twitter @artindubai (www.twitter.com/artindubai).

Sinking Ships at Total Arts Gallery, Dubai

Total Arts at the Courtyard presents:

Sinking Ships

Installation and Photography exhibition by

DARIUSH ZANDI and SHAQAYEQ ARABI

20 MARCH TO 30 APRIL

Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;


On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,


In navigable weather it is always a seamark


To lay a course by: but in the somber season


Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

The Dry Salvages, TS Eliot

The dhow, once the lifeblood of the UAE, has, with the onset of today’s fast-paced way of life, diminished in importance. Today many of these majestic boats are abandoned and derelict, left prey to the elements until they fall apart. As the old generation passes away, and with it, its sea-faring history, and modernity and progress take over, these great behemoths of the sea now lie at the bottom of sandy graves, covered by the rolling coastal dunes or buried beneath the shifting tides.

In Sinking Ships, artists Dariush Zandi and Shaqayeq Arabi navigate a cultural landscape in both a literal and symbolic state of decay. Photography and installation come together to create a nostalgic resurrection of the past and an exploration of notions of deterioration, fragility and vulnerability in a prism of ethical and ideological displacement.

The fast-paced buzz of the 21st century may have little room for the slower rhythms of the past, yet here, using the ribs of a decayed dhow, a past moment is captured through an image of the present. In laying out the wooden fragments of a shipwreck, they form a blueprint of sorts, an architectural diagram, as though they were instructions on how to create a boat. In doing so, the dhow becomes a phoenix of sorts, rising from its ashes and living anew. Dramatic black and white photographs of dhows and fishing nets shot in 1983, form the backdrop to what is almost an archaeological dig – yet it is in this very excavation of a fast dying past that it is given a new lease of life. While tinged with melancholy, there is something inspiring and majestic about the silhouettes of the dhows, for here, through their presence, the live on.

Total Arts

+971 4 347 5050

totalart@courtyard-uae.com, www.courtyard-uae.com

Sheikh Zayed Road (E11), Al Qouz Ind 1, Street 4b,
Courtyard Building, Mezzanine Floor

Here, There and Everywhere

Marcelo Guimarães Lima

Art Dubai 2012

The sixth edition of Art Dubai closed Saturday, the 24th of March 2012. What is the balance of this major annual event for the visual arts in the city of Dubai? Art Dubai is an art fair whose main purpose is to bring galleries together with collectors, sellers and buyers of art. Around the commerce of contemporary artworks, an art forum discussing contemporary art issues and other activities, of a more or less cultural, critical, pedagogical character, were organized. The art forum and other activities however remained tangential, secondary to the main focus of Art Dubai, which is, the financial aspects within and around the contemporary art world: trading, owning, collecting, appraising, etc. In this, we can say that Art Dubai is perhaps closer to its “sister” event in Abu Dhabi, the annual Art Abu Dhabi exhibition, and somewhat distant from the model of the Sharjah Biennial, which is conceived as an international showcase of contemporary art focusing on artworks and their producers, in the context of ideas and, theoretically as well as de facto, on the institutional issues and problems of art today. Could we say therefore that these three major artistic events in the UAE are complementary? Not exactly. In fact, these initiatives, which run parallel to each other, share no synergies.

Works by M. F. Hussain

Burhan Kum

That a predominantly commercial art fair is the main visual arts event in Dubai could be questioned in relation to future developments in the contemporary art scene in this city that has embraced global exchanges, in finance and in commerce, as the source of its material energies, present and future, beyond the oil economy that made possible the initial phases of economic growth and development.

In fact, in the commonly called immaterial economy of the 21st century the role of ideas, in the (believe it or not) interrelated fields of science, the arts, the technological domains, in short, what we can call the cultural sphere at large, is more and more evidently crucial for the production and distribution of wealth in its double, interrelated, inseparable material and moral dimensions as, more than ever, a global process. A process in which local actors (countries, states, peoples, corporations, institutions, etc.) become equally responsible within an international configuration of economic activities, and their concomitant or interrelated political, ideological, etc., components, and must share benefits and costs alike. In such a context, cultural development becomes a decisive element, perhaps the decisive issue of our times.

Mounir Fatmi

Francisco Faria

By cultural development we mean the growing knowledge and awareness of ourselves and of our world. Cultural development is the development of the instruments of knowledge of the real issues confronting us today, as opposed to the myths, false questions and false antagonisms, cultivated and manipulated ignorance and obscurantism, as against the interested misrepresentations and the self-serving illusions that may and in fact do divide us in a time of crucial choices and vital challenges. Cultural development is the promotion of all the domains of activities, institutional structures and disciplines of thought that contribute to the development of real knowledge about ourselves, and about our real conditions (as opposed to our imagined conditions). Among those, the arts.

installation / performance by Marya Kazoun

Arash Hanaei

Art is the domain in which the interrelated internal and external conflicts and antagonisms that challenge and divide the human being, the struggles that constitute the process of individual growth and social development, its energies, possibilities and risks, are brought to consciousness in more or less indirect ways. That is, they are represented and therefore made into objects of possible knowledge and oriented actions: a sentient knowledge, which is the symbolic knowledge of the cultural order; a concrete knowledge of our universal nature that allows us to represent to ourselves our choices, our past and our intended future, uniting the emotional life of the mind and the mindful dimension of our emotional experiences.

The matter of culture, broadly defined, has always been that crucial, and yet it becomes even more crucial in our globalized times. With the exponential development of technology, breaking the confinements of established social, economic and political practices and structures, we confront the growth of historical challenges, demanding ever more comprehensive answers to ever more pressing and global, that is inclusive, complex and large-scale problems.

And so with art, whose present context is no less dramatic than that of the culture at large. As it happens, the hedonist vision of art takes the part for the whole. Indeed, what we may call, a strategy of seduction is at work even in the most aggressive or disruptive works of art of our time. Art works are embodiments of our emotional life as symbolized and represented affects. They cannot escape the “aesthetic laws” of matter that has been “impregnated” with affective and intellectual meanings, although these “laws” themselves, by nature never completely codified, change or mutate in time. And yet, the systematic confusion between means and ends makes even the grain of truth in hedonist theories irrelevant to the understanding of the tensions and dilemmas within the contemporary field of the arts.

Alfred Tarazi

William Kentridge

Since Kant and Hegel we have known that modernity is self-reflective, that the knower is part of (his) knowledge, and that true knowledge gives us, in a self-reflective manner, with the objects of knowledge themselves, its own conditions of possibility, the conditions of possibility of these objects. And so with art, whose “loss of innocence” that came about in the mid and late 19th century lead to the “loss of evidence” theorized by Adorno in the late 20th century. By “innocence” we mean art’s ignorance or misrepresentation of its own condition of possibility. “Loss of evidence” refers to Adorno’s notion of the radical social-historic transformations in the 20th century, the advent of the administered society and its ideological arm: the cultural industry, challenging the very conditions of possibility of art, its concept and practice.

At this point it may appears that I have been carried away with theoretical considerations and have stranded from my initial question about the balance of Art Dubai 2012. In fact I have not, I believe this is the very heart of the matter. Art Dubai 2012 in a sense repeats Art Dubai 2011, 2010, and so on. And that may be the actual proof of a successful formula, no doubt. Art Dubai is an international art show with clear limits to what it proposes to do in fact, if not in the manner of its self-presentation. The commerce of art is perhaps a necessary thing if artists are to live off their works, although as the world changes, the very conditions of possibility of the profession of visual artist change, and artists are more and more challenged to reinvent themselves and their profession. The commerce of art by itself is certainly not a sufficient condition for art to take root, to expand and grow. More is needed for the development of contemporary visual arts in Dubai. More knowledge, more education, diversification of venues and types of art, institutional support for artists, more opportunity for the development of local talent in the multicultural, multiethnic reality of Dubai today, etc., etc. Above all, a critical mass of local critical thinking to guide internal developments by considerations other than the uses of art in advertising and marketing.

Since its inception, the merit of Art Dubai has been to bring attention to the visual arts and their possible place in the global-local / center-periphery dialectics of development in Dubai. But things in our post-post modern world do change fast. The time for that initial contribution is already past. The role of the arts in a process of cultural development remains a question and returns as perhaps a new question at each time, given the fact that a time of change and challenges, as it flows, is never identical to itself. Therefore new answers are needed. In culture, as in the economy, as indeed in life itself, growth (that is, development, innovation, creativity) is a condition of survival. May Art Dubai expand in the future, transforming itself with the times, thereby contributing in new ways, practically and conceptually, to the dynamic of the visual arts in Dubai.

FID Foire Internationale du Dessin on line 2012

For its 4th edition, the Foire Internationale du Dessin (International Drawing Fair) is becoming the first 100% online drawing fair: drawings for the future.

Since 2007, FID has been discovering young artists working in the medium of drawing and helping to launch their career, nationally and internationally.

“Serghei Litvin has been hunting for fresh talent” Le Monde

“Real rejuvenation!” Le Point

“A completely new kind of show” La Tribune de Genève

“Responding to the crisis, FID is minimalist.” International Herald Tribune

FID is open to art school students and independent young artists

Open for applications: Tuesday 13 March–Friday 13 April 2012.

The international jury selects the exhibitors.

Exhibitors present their drawings at the online fair.

Price of drawings: minimum 200€ / maximum 400€.

The exhibitor receives 70% of the sale price.

Members of the public vote (“like”).

The fair will be held in May/June 2012 on onlineFID.com

Winners of the vote will exhibited in international partner galleries.

For further information: onlineFID.com.

http://onlinefid.com/