In the early evening on Sunday, September 7th, seven hand made boats, or more precisely, seven floating sculptures by Swoon, will dock in front of Deitch Studios on the East River in Long Island City. Their arrival at Deitch Studios will be the final stop on a three-week journey down the Hudson River and around the tip of Manhattan. The seven boats, built by Swoon and her friends from scrap wood and other discarded materials, began their sail down the Hudson River on August 15th in Troy, New York, stopping along the way for musical and theatrical performances. Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea is a two-part exhibition merging Swoon’s recent portraits, found objects of urban decay and a floating sculptural city. One part of the exhibition is on the water. The other is in the gallery.

The Swimming Cities is designed and organized by printmaker and installation artist Swoon. Collaborators include playwright Lisa D’Amour, the band Dark Dark Dark and circus composer Sxip Shirey. Propulsion systems brought by John Rinaldi and Kinetic Steam Works. Boat design and carpentry created in close collaboration with Jeff Stark, Iris Lasson, and with guidance from The Floating Neutrinos.

Opening: Friday, Sept. 5, 5 - 9 PM
55 Notre-Dame West (Metro Place D'Armes)

Diana Arce, Mathieu Beauséjour, Caro Caron, Howard Chackowicz, Kathryn
Delaney, Ronen Eidelman, Freda Guttman, Gord Hill, Dayna McLeod, Jesse
Purcell, Michael Rakowitz, The Shining Mantis, Jackie Sumell / Herman
Wallace, Rick Trembles, Tania Willard

The Art + Anarchy Montreal 2008 collective is pleased to invite you to the
opening of a new exhibition in Montreal, Dissident Art, on September 5th
from 5 pm - 9 pm at 55 Notre-Dame West (in Old Montreal, metro Place
d'Armes). The vernissage will feature performances by Diana Arce (Berlin),
showcasing her political speech karaoke Politaoke in Montreal for this first
time, and The Shining Mantis (New York), engaging in a spontanteous
chalk-on-black-wall drawing war between the collective's two members.

Returning after the success of the Art + Anarchy exhibition in 2007, which
saw 230 local and international artists exhibit their work, this year's
exhibition represents a more curated turn with fifteen artists. From Caro
Caron's (Montreal) excellent artistic musings on the gentrification of
Montreal's artist neighbourhoods to the pairing up of artist Jackie Sumell
(Brooklyn) and Herman Wallace, a Black Panther member whose life sentence is
currently up for review, the exhibition offers variety in concept, style and
contribution to the meaning of dissidence in art. In addition to the fifteen
chosen artists, the exhibition will be offering a room in which unsolicited
artists are invited to come hang their own political work.

friday, september 5, 5 - 9pm: Vernissage
Featuring performances by Diana Arce and The Shining Mantis

wednesday, september 10, 7 - 9pm: David Widgington on Ink on Paper on Poles
Montrealer David Widgington - author of the 2007 publication Picture This!, founder of the renowned yet now defunct Cumulus Press and member of the activist filmmaking collective Les Lucioles - joins guests in a discussion of the history of the poster as both political tool - ideal for its rapid, efficient and powerful dissemination of information - and visual culture object, artifact and evidence of Montreal’s historically rich cultural landscape.

saturday, september 13, 2 - 4pm: The Writing on the Wall with Sterling Downing
Join Under Pressure founder, publisher and spokesperson Sterling Downing for a high colour, in gallery slide show and moderated discussion with Isa Tousignant about the legal ramifications and political quagmire of graffiti in Canada. Where does freedom of expression end?

thursday, september 18, 7 - 9pm: Radical Cinema with Santiago Bertolino
This two-hour event will be a screening of short films followed by a discussion period with the filmmaker Santiago Bertolino and guests. Bertolino, who has produced and directed films on current social struggles and was one of the founders of filmmaking collective Les Lucioles, has run the video blog Parole Citizen for the last two years and recently co-founded Funambules Media, a co-operative with a mandate to produce, make and distribute radical films.

thursday, september 25, 7 - 9pm: Puppets as Protest with Mark Sussman
An introduction to the community-based approach of Great Small Works and to the creation of political and socially-minded performances that animate public space, while renewing the spirits of participants and audiences alike, and promoting participation in public life. Mark Sussman is a theatre artist, scholar and co-founder of New York’s celebrated Great Small Works collective, producing giant community-based puppet shows, and miniature toy theatre spectacles.

sunday, september 28, 12 - 8pm: Closing Reception
Featuring Dayna Mcleod’s performance HotBeaverWetPussy.com from 2-6pm

From the website:

In today’s highly charged political, economic, corporate and environmental climate, it is natural that there exist a variety of viewpoints on the world and its future. Quebec is a national cradle of revolutionary thought, especially in art (think of the Refus Global!), so it’s no surprise that every year, Montreal houses the largest anarchist event in North America: the Festival of Anarchy, which includes the renowned Anarchist Book Fair.

The volunteer founding committee of Art + Anarchy Montreal was created in an effort to expand the presence of socially and politically engaged artwork within the Festival of Anarchy and the city, and to develop a yearly artistic event that would promote and encourage creators who crave change, propose fresh perspectives and tackle issues in their art. These issues run the gamut: gender equality, cultural policy, world politics, environmental strategies, basic human rights.

The first Art + Anarchy Montreal exhibition took place in a gargantuan loft in Park Extension for two weeks in May 2007, and presented the art of 230 local and international artists. Galvanized by its success, a new committee was formed to organize the 2008 edition, titled Dissident Art.

Our space is different this year – smaller and more central, located a few steps away from Notre-Dame Cathedral in Old Montreal – but representative of our basic belief that to remain as independent as possible from systemic assumptions, one must be located, physically, outside the system; in this case Montreal’s existing gallery network. Our artist selection is a fraction of last year’s, quantatively speaking, but perhaps more poignant qualitatively as well. The 15 artists we’ve invited hail from the four corners of the globe and span the breadth of the ideological spectrum. Essential to the exhibition is also the free wall, a section of the exhibition where unsolicited artists from near and far are invited to post their political art for the duration of the exhibition.

For the entire month of September, from the 5th to the 28th, we wish to transform 55 Notre-Dame West (an ex-currency exchange office) into a place of inspiration thanks to incredible art and weekly activities, covering everything from puppetry for public protest to the legal ramifications of graffiti, activist documentary making and the art of radical postering. Help us fill a void with thi

Peterson describes how Karl, a hotelier by trade in his youth, became a wildlife photographer and how this shift of career brought him into contact with the bushmeat business. Travelling around the region of the Congo river basin, he found hunters and markets and traders doing a brisk business in cuts of ape meat, along with other rainforest meat products too numerous to be mentioned here. Although it's true that the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa have been eating these animals for centuries, certain recent developments have led to a catastrophic upswing in the amount of meat being taken from the forest. It's at this point that we all become complicit.
Logging interests, principally from Europe, open roads into the heart of the forest. Hunters follow the logging operations and penetrate deeply into the newly-accessible patches of jungle to provide meat for the hordes of migrant timber-cutters and machinery operators and their families. That's one way. Another way involves mining.
The high tech industries on which so much of the world now relies for communication and business infrastructure receive certain vital elements from mines in the jungles of the two Congos. Preeminent among these elements is coltan, also known as columbite-tantalite, and its associated minerals like cassiterite, wolframite, etc. These minerals are used to manufacture capacitors for cellular phones, personal computers, and video game systems, among other things. Miners clear the forest and hack at the earth, living terrible lives of squalor and poverty and violence. Their takes are routinely hijacked by groups of armed men from the various militias and armies that infest the region. In fact, one could make a pretty good case that the recent African World War that killed hundreds of thousands of people and involved the militaries of at least ten nations, was driven in part by the desire to control the flow of these minerals and the giant heaps of profit that can be wrung from them. The mineral supply flowing from the region has become so integral to aspects of our global economy that the release of the Playstation 2 in the 90's was delayed because of a crunch in the tantalum supply.

Eating Apes focusses a large chapter, called "Denial", on the failure of international conservation agencies to deal effectively with this problem. The agencies, Peterson says, have shot themselves in the foot by deciding to deal with conservation issues on an economic basis, under the rubric of the concept of "sustainable development".
Just for the record, "sustainable development" is an oxymoron. Especially when referring to an African forest where 300-1000 year old trees are being cut in 30 year cycles. Conservation groups perform cost-benefit analyses to determine appropriate rates of bushmeat "off-take" and come up with a figure of sustainability at one person per square kilometer. Unfortunately, actual population densities in the affected regions are at 25 persons per square kilometer and they are doubling every two decades or so.
The point of "sustainable development" is to provide infrastructure, resources, a tax base for nations that lack such things, while at the same time inhibiting the total depletion of all living things and the land beneath them. It's common to refer to the forest and its inhabitants as the "resources" that a nation possesses. I beg to disagree. Defining these things as resources is a central problem in the way we late-capitalist humans look at the world. Are forests and animals merely chips to be raked up and turned in to the payout window?
Biologist John Oates has this to say: "The international conservation establishment's embrace of development and deliberate decision to promote conservation on economic rather than ethical/aesthetic grounds has been deeply corrupting." Really! Amazing. So you're saying that having as your base motivation the desire to profit might cause some problems to arise with your stated goal of preventing the hacking apart of every living thing that isn't human on earth? Huh.
One of the most amazing stories in this book is the tale of Karl's attempt to concretely inhibit the ability of bushmeat hunters to hunt gorillas. Let me try to sum it up. Gorilla hunters were using a shotgun cartridge with large caliber shot to kill large adult male silverback gorillas. Karl tried to have the French company that manufactured the cartridges stop production. Karl then discovered that with the large caliber cartridge unavailable, the hunters switched to the next largest which, while useless for bringing down the silverbacks, was ideal for killing the females. Females, you know, the ones that actually have the babies. At the same time other companies were circling like sharks looking to fill the gap. What a situation! Karl backed off on his project.
It's stories like this that illustrate the bolus of paradoxes at the heart of this issue. Insisting that apes should not be allowed to go extinct as a result of human appetites is usually done by people who aren't hungry for protein. That is, by people who can afford mahogany desks for their corporate offices, or at least a computer to send out an e-mail blast to the anti-bushmeat listserv to stage a protest when the premier of Cameroon is in town. Why shouldn't the African poor be allowed to eat and industrially exploit their wildlife to extinction? Europeans and North Americans and Asians have already done so, to their great developmental benefit. Isn't development necessary for the alleviation of poverty? Shouldn't Africans have the same right to earn money and buy playstations and cellphones that Americans have? Isn't it racist to suggest otherwise? Who are you to criticise the traditional hunting practises of indigenous people?
Of course, the Africans generally aren't profiting, unless they have guns. The money flows to where it has always flowed, since the Belgians and the French and the British ruled Sub-Saharan Africa. It flows to the people who already have it. Money is magnetic in that way. Very, very little remains behind in the countries from which the "resources" are extracted, except for in the pockets of the people who have the power. The people doing the shit work can be expected to be paid in kind: in shit.
Fortunately, there will be meat for them to eat. Why? Because NATURE BATS LAST.
Arguments abound. Barbs fly. And the apes continue to die.
Peterson says," Why is it true that most ordinary Americans appear unaware of the eating apes/ bushmeat crisis? Part of the answer could be, quite simply, that news about the natural world is normally regarded as secondary to news about the human condition." The second half of that statement should be written in the sky in letters of fire, because it is the reason why the earth is being killed. Because Humans Really Don't Care About Anything But Ourselves.
Also, noone cares about what happens in Africa. Africa might as well be Pluto.
People don't like to look at these pictures. National Geographic turned Karl down because his images were "too disturbing". It raises all sorts of bugbears in the brain, looking at these pictures. Apes look like us. The eating of them smacks of cannibalism. Cannibalism is an uncomfortable thing to accuse poor Africans of. The mind reels with, pardon my phrasing, the horror.
I would like to say this. Apes ARE us. As is the rest of the natural world. We are a part of it, although we like to pretend that we are not. It is the humans that are the problem. Repeat that. It is the humans that are the problem. As our populations explode and tens of thousands of species are herded into the extinction chute, we must look at ourselves, as a species, and truly digest (sorry) what we are doing.
Near the beginning of Eating Apes, Peterson describes one of the ony things that really separates us from our ape relatives. It isn't language, as Chomsky would have you believe. Apes can learn American Sign. It isn't tool-using, because chimps and bonobos use a wide variety of tools.It isn't the opposable thumb. It isn't upright posture. It isn't self-awareness or abstract thought.
It is the fact that we cook our food.
I have a hard time with politics these days. Nothing seems to matter but the Earth's evisceration. What is to be done?

More popular than ever, Banksy commemorated the 3 year anniversary with jabs at military "security" and the "Grey Ghost", with other pieces that celebrated New Orleans culture and Second lines
.Again using his cleverness and wit to raise some poignant and necessary issues.
Like why, 3 years later, hasn't the necessary infrastructure been created to protect ALL its citizens from another storm?

From the Artist himself.

Photos courtesy of Dingler1109
Thanks to NOLA Rising for raising consciousness of whats goin on!

Overspray is the world's first and only 100% international street art magazine. Created and run by artists, Overspray and all it's satellites exist to document and further urban culture in all it's facets. Our ultimate goal is to inspire and provide tools to anyone who feels it necessary to create art, and sustain the community through bringing it together.

Meridian Gallery
535 Powell Street
San Francisco, California
September 4 - November 4 2008
reception - Thursday September 4th, 6-9 PM

Meridian Gallery
(415) 398-7229
info@meridiangallery.org

Image: Juan Fuentes. See more images here.

Art of Democracy - www.artofdemocracy.org
Posters - www.artofdemocracy.org/posters/posters.html
Exhibits - www.artofdemocracy.org/galleries/All-shows.html
Art of Democracy on Flickr - www.flickr.com/photos/art-of-democracy/

An exhibition with work of forty five artists:
Scott Anderson
David Avery
Will Barnet
Jesus Barraza
Sandow Birk
Fernando Botero
Mark Bryan
Enrique Chagoya
Robbie Conal
Guy Colwell
Francisco Dominguez
Eric Drooker
Ala Ebtekar
Kevin Evans
Bella Feldman
Stephen Fredericks
Juan Fuentes
J. C. Garrett
Art Hazelwood
Frances Jetter
David Jones
Hung Liu
Roberta Loach
Mary V Marsh
Fernando Marti
Doug Minkler
Claude Moller
Malaquias Montoya
Pat Oliphant
Ariel Parkinson
Francesca Pastine
Patrick Piazza
Phyllis Plattner
Gary-Paul Prince
Rigo 23
Favianna Rodriguez
Ben Sakoguchi
Jos Sances
SF Print Collective
Mark Vallen
Gee Vaucher
Mary Hull Webster
Howard Whitehouse and Richard Linder
William Wiley
Bruce Yurgil