Thursday, June 30, 2016

Many people, many bodies in "installation art" otherwise categorized as spectacle and performance art/photography - work of Spencer Tunick

http://spencertunick.com/installations

"In July 1994, Spencer Tunick phoned all the people who had expressed
interest in posing nude individually for his public street photographs
and asked them to come together as a group. Of all the locations in
New York the artist could have chosen for this first group work, he
decided to pick the epicenter of world politics, the United Nations. A
total of 25 people showed up to pose on that remarkable early
morning, naked and brave in front of the General Assembly building.
This day launched Tunick’s Reaction Zone series.

The book Reaction Zone presents the definitive collection of Tunick’s
early New York City photographic assemblages of nude bodies. The
artworks included combine risk and urgency as Tunick uses
gestural splashes of flesh like an action painter uses paint.

In his introduction for Reaction Zone, Carlo McCormick relays the feel
of making work on the city streets and the pressure of creating
“human graffiti” under the radar of the authorities."


Registering volunteer participants:

https://www.hull2017.co.uk/whatson/events/seaofhull/


Paddle8: Non-Violence Sculpture / Spencer Tunick - Spencer Tunick

photo-montage by Spencer Tunick



What Tunick plans for the upcoming Natl. Republican Convention:

http://www.papermag.com/naked-women-protest-rnc-with-artist-spencer-tunick-1894101971.html

Monday, June 27, 2016

The Jesse Williams BET Speech - June 26, 2016

Read His Speech in Full:

“This award, this is not for me. This is for the real organizers all over the country. The activists, the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the teachers, the students, that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do.
All right? It’s kind of basic mathematics:, the more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize. Now this is also in particular for the black women, in particular, who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you.
Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s going to happen is we are going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.
Now — I’ve got more, y’all. Yesterday would’ve been young Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday, so I don’t want to hear anymore about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on a 12-year-old playing alone in a park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich. Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better to live in 2012 than 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to Darrien Hunt.
Now the thing is though, all of us in here getting money, that alone isn’t going to stop this. All right? Now dedicating our lives to get money just to give it right back for someone’s brand on our body, when we spent centuries praying with brands on our bodies and now we pray to get paid for brands on our bodies.
There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done, there’s been no tax they haven’t levied against us, and we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow always conditional here. “You’re free,” they keep telling us. But she would’ve been alive if she hadn’t acted so… “free.”
Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter. But, you know what though? The hereafter is a hustle. We want it now. And let’s get a couple of things straight, just a little side note: The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, all right, stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.
We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind, while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil, black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is, though, the thing is that just because we’re magic, doesn’t mean we’re not real.”