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Victoria Ruiz of Downtown Boys on gentrification & displacement
Chanel co-opts a cultural movement / by Faye Orlove
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Last week, Chanel, helmed by notorious lover of all women, Karl Lagerfeld, turned its runway into a “feminist” “protest.” The act of for-profit brands using trendy feminist discourse as a way to sell products to women is not new. But it’s
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not always this ironic.
Ironically, Lagerfeld has perviously been sued for “defamatory and discriminatory” comments towards women. But I guess that ‘HE FOR SHE’ sign proves he totally
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acknowledges male privilege. Ironically, during the German occupation of France, Coco Chanel had a relationship with a Nazi officer. But now we can mostly ignore that because Chanel wants to ‘MAKE FASHION NOT WAR.’ Ironically, the runway . . .
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On prison justice, art of the incarcerated, and Interference Archive's new show / by Liz Pelly
Interference Archive is a volunteer-run archive in Gowanus, Brooklyn, dedicated to preserving cultural ephemera related to social movements. The space house thousands of publications, fliers, zines, buttons, plus other bits and pieces, and also hosts events and exhibitions. The archive's current exhibit, "Self-Determination Inside/Out: Prison Movements Reshaping Society", focuses on work made by prisoners and allies from the 1970s to present. It's a compelling look at the culture of prisons, including prison newsletters, pamphlets, video and audio interviews, prints, photography, magazine covers, and more. Starting with materials created during the 1971 Attica Rebellion, a massive prisoner uprising in upstate New York, and concluding with work made by current political prisoners, the show highlights moments of self-organization within the prison industrial complex. Sections focus on the work of incarcerated AIDS educators, the experiences of women and queer prisoners, prison labor, and control unit prisons. The show -- organized by Molly Fair, Josh MacPhee, Anika Paris, Laura Whitehorn, and Ryan Wong -- is on display until November 16. During the first week of the exhibit's run, we sat down with MacPhee to discuss the goals and challenges of this sort of exhibit and prison reform activism in general.
What initially inspired the creation of Interference Archive, which mostly houses ephemeral material like posters, t-shirts, and newsletters?
For the different people involved, there are different answers of course. For me, I grew up making this stuff through DIY music, cultural stuff, politics. Through the act of doing, I started collecting it. Flyers, t-shirts, buttons, the ephemera that gets produced by people who are organizing. It was a combination of wanting to understand the history of what I was doing and then at the same time, I was getting really interested in this idea of how people make art and culture in the context of trying to transform their lives. It's distinct from art that's produced purely in the realm of self expression, and the art that tends circulate within the contemporary art world.
This kind of material gets lost. It's often not clearly authored. Institutions that deal with art don't quite know what to do with it. Since it's so political, places like history museums don't know what to do with it either. It sort of falls through the cracks. But we can see during times like Occupy, or Tahrir Square in Egypt, or with the Maidan in the Ukraine, that this is the stuff of life, [created] when transformation . . .
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WEEKLIES
by Mike Kaminsky
Join us.
by Bela Messex
Out of my Head.
by Pandora Christ
You seem so out-of-sorts, your twitter lately has been so not like u.
by Zach Phillips
A conversation with Black Bananas.
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