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Variant 27 Winter 2006
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Front cover
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Putting Dada Flesh on the Bone
John Beagles
"[H]istorical Dada and Surrealism has found itself reassessed, revised and repackaged in numerous recent exhibitions...while the popularity of a litany of artists referencing, name checking and stealing from both movements is undeniable." Beagles examines "the contrasting aims of two recent projects to revise accepted ideas about the nature and legacy of New York Dada – Amelia Jones’ book Irrational Modernism : A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, and David Hopkins’ publication and exhibition at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery Dada’s Boys."
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Get a Fucking Job: The Truth about Begging
New Social Art School
Prompted by a campaign for a ban of begging in Aberdeen, the book ‘Get a Fucking Job: The Truth About Begging’ by The New Social Art School is a collection of conversations with beggars, former beggars, relatives and support workers, critically thought over here by a member of the School.
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Chemical-Cocktail-Fruit
Jan Nimmo
Working with banana workers in Costa Rica, involved in labour rights and occupational health issues, personally brought home to Nimmo the parallels with what's happened to workers' health in Scotland. Nimmo works as an activist and artist to expose the human and environmental damage caused by the expansion of big cash crop plantations and their use of pesticides and agrochemicals, raising awareness amongst UK consumers of the hidden costs behind the fruit we eat.
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Rose Coloured Spectacles
Tom Jennings
"[T]he last few years have seen a growing tendency for supposedly progressive themes to be tackled in big-budget Hollywood fictions, along with the incorporation of originally marginal aesthetic choices and strategies in the production of cinematic blockbusters, brands and franchises. This survey describes some of these phenomena and the critical response to them, and discusses their ambivalent implications and limitations."
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http://www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
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Competing Narratives Exposed
Did you hear that two Palestinians were captured the day before that Israeli soldier was?
Rena Bivens
Many issues problematize mainstream media’s coverage of conflict: the influence of public relations and intense pressure by well-organised lobby groups to supply journalists with information that supports their favoured narrative are just a few. The danger is of neglecting contextualization in favour of what appears to be a preconceived narrative of action followed by response and retaliation, as with the June 25th capture of Cpl Shalit by Palestinian militants...
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Blairism on the walls at Kelvingrove
Stephen Dawber
At a cost of nearly £28 million, Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum has been radically altered. There is even a ‘new epistemology of museums’ attached, drafted by Mark O’Neill, Glasgow’s Head of Museums and Galleries. His apparent innovation is to cast out the old Victorian taxonomies, to replace them with a classification based on the telling of stories. Yet the gulf between the ‘theorising’ and the actual experience of the museum, Dawber argues, reveals an arch propagandist at work - that the link between public policy and museum practice is not always direct, but in the case of Kelvingrove the bonds cut unusually deep...
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Academies, Religion and Private Philanthropy
Peter Vlachos
Vlachos argues that with the forcing through of sponsored Academies: " What we are now seeing is a return to pre-welfare state economics. An attempt by government to disengage itself from the delivery of key social services like education." And even more worryingly, that: "Academy schools will lead to more ... religious schools, and will correspondingly increase the fragmentary divisions between young people and whole societies."
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Louis – The Round The World Rug Race
Metaphrog
Louis is an unassuming little worker who lives with his pet bird FC (Formulaic Companion) in Hamlet, a colourful place in which all the houses are alike and fenced off. The stories follow Louis' attempts to live his dreams and draw grown ups and children alike into a scary-cute world where the citizens' lives are stiffled and their actions more or less controlled by Entertainment Centres and obscure regulations. The 12 page black and white short story previously appeared in the US anthology 'SPX 2003: a sequential arts travelogue'.
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http://www.louisandfc.com
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Telling the Truth About Neo-liberalism:
The 2006 Socialist Register anthology
Alex Law
"'A generalized pathology of chronic mendacity seems to be a structural condition of global capitalism at the beginning of the 21st century’. It is not just that lies are being told as the occupational hazard of politicians and their media courtesans, but rather that lying and hypocrisy have become an endemic condition of the neoliberal world order." Required reading!
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Rebel Alliances
Interview with Ben Franks, author of 'Rebel Alliances', 'an applied philosophical perspective on contemporary class-struggle anarchism in Britain'. Franks comes up with illuminating and entertaining responses, not least regarding anarchism and academia.
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Ahmadinejad: Myth and Reality
Yassamine Mather
"...as the threat of sanctions and military intervention against Iran has increased, sections of the anti-war movement outside Iran have launched a concerted effort in support of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. However, inside the country the new government’s failure to deliver any of its promises of economic prosperity for the majority of the population has brought nothing more than increased poverty and repression for the working class, women, youth and minorities."
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From Self to Structure:
Challenging the ‘Happiness Industry’
Colin Clark
"...how do we tend to define and understand ‘happiness’ (or, rather, what is called ‘subjective well being’ in certain disciplines); how to critically unpick the ‘industry and business’ of happiness; and how to situate these concerns within the contemporary debates we are witnessing in Scotland, especially centred around the ‘confidence and well-being’ agenda and the Scottish Executive drive (and money being spent) in this area?"
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Turkey’s US-backed War On Terror: A Cause For Concern?
Desmond Fernandes
With the US government aiming to vigorously assist the Turkish state in hunting down and eradicating the so-called 'rebel' Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), many human rights organisations, Kurdish and Turkish civilians, peace campaigners and public interest groups fear a return to the genocidal practices and chilling psychological warfare that went on in the 1990s. This is a relentless exposé and analysis by Fernandes as to why there is concern over a resurgence of intensive US-backed support for the Turkish state’s 'War on Terror'.
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The Chinese Challenge: Hallucinations for Other Futures
Think Art Lab
Cultures depend on their paradigm of writing, it being the most abstract mechanism and technology of cultural formations. China’s writing is not limited by alphabetic linearism and digitalism, hence Kerr advances the possible re-discovery of the operationality of its writing system for the design of new rational formal systems, such as mathematics and programming languages, emerging beyond exhausted Western paradigms.
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Chinese version
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Supplement
Variant issue 27 also included the programme for Document 4 : International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival. www.docfilmfest.org.uk
Heavyweight Planet / Lightweight Nation
Doug Aubrey
"In a small nation that seems to perpetually struggle with itself and with its own identity, we need to face up to a stark situation where – if we are not careful – the cultural agenda will not be created by but marketed at us as residents, audiences and cultural producers alike, by a centralised elite. ...let’s forget about any ‘Brit-Doc’ style branding with its ‘Cool Britannia’ undertones, nor let us retreat into the petty, self-interested, art world nationalism that’s currently being cultivated here in Scotland. Let’s instead start to talk about Internationalism."
[Originally commissioned as an introductory text for the Document 4 programme]
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