The hell of war comes home. In July 2009 Colorado Springs Gazettea published a two-part series entitled “Casualties of War”. The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. Returning soldiers were committing murder at a rate 20 times greater than other young American males. A seperate investiagtion into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We hear little about the personal hell soldiers live through after returning home.
(via Dorothy | Casualties of War)
Posted: May 10, 2011 at 6:09 pm.
This tally of military suicides is outside the studio of Brooklyn artist Sebastian Errasuriz. Its power comes from its simplicity.
via Engaged Public Space and Shameless Plugs » ThickCulture
Posted: December 16, 2010 at 5:32 pm.
A few years ago, French photographer Sacha Goldberger found his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika feeling lonely and depressed. To cheer her up, he suggested that they shoot a series of outrageous photographs in unusual costumes, poses, and locations. Grandma reluctantly agreed, but once they got rolling, she couldn’t stop smiling.
Frederika was born in Budapest 20 years before World War II. During the war, at the peril of her own life, she courageously saved the lives of ten people. When asked how, Goldberger told us “she hid the Jewish people she knew, moving them around to different places every day.” As a survivor of Nazism and Communism, she then immigrated away from Hungary to France, forced by the Communist regime to leave her homeland illegally or face death.
Aside from great strength, Frederika has an incredible sense of humor, one that defies time and misfortune. She is funny and cynical, always mocking the people that she loves.
via
Posted: November 24, 2010 at 1:33 pm.
Funism by Norm Magnusson
Norm Magnusson’s “historical markers” along I-75, intend to provoke unthought thoughts in public spaces.
via
Posted: October 9, 2010 at 9:24 pm.
So when I first tried Hey Baby, a new Web game that takes aim at catcalling and its practitioners, I thought it was not meant for me. Developed by the New York artist and producer Suyin Looui, Hey Baby at first appears to be a self-consciously ridiculous revenge fantasy for women who have felt oppressed or threatened by sexual attention or commentary from men. Think of “Death Wish” with a woman walking home from work in the role of Charles Bronson.
Yet over several hours my initial alienation and annoyance gave way to a swelling appreciation of Hey Baby, not as a game but as a provocative, important work of interactive art as social commentary. The people who should really play Hey Baby are men, even if you have never said a word to a woman you didn’t know on the street.
…And that is the point of Hey Baby. The men cannot ever actually hurt you, but no matter what you do, they keep on coming, forever. The game never ends. I found myself throwing up my hands and thinking, “Well what am I supposed to do?” Which is, of course, what countless women think every day.
Video Game Review - In Hey Baby, Street Wolves Meet Their Match - NYTimes.com
Posted: June 21, 2010 at 5:14 pm.
Imagine a museum that boasts the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe. Now imagine that an intrepid female curator puts all the men’s work in storage and fills the permanent collection galleries with a new version of 20th and early 21st century art history, the one that women created.
At Paris’ Pompidou Center, the year of the women
Posted: May 26, 2009 at 6:50 am.
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