Walter Benjamin and Branden Joseph on Media as Resistance

Walter Benjamin on film, 1936:

"Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and our furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst the prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling."

Branden Joseph on the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 2002:

"Yet, in its time the EPI mobilized the conflictual, deterritorialized forces of electronic media toward the explosion of a newly developing postinstitutional prison-world ... amongst the far-flung debris of which some, at least, would find it possible - less calmly, perhaps, but no less adventurously - to go traveling."

Works Cited
Branden Joseph, "My Mind Split Open": Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable," Grey Room 08       (Summer 2002), p. 98.
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, Ed.                 Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) p. 236.

Photo: Fred W. McDarrah, The Velvet Underground at The Dom, April 1, 1966.

The Selling of France's May of 1968

Remembering May 1968 in France:

Even Fauchon, the expensive gourmet store whose color is hot pink, has lined up with the zeitgeist. The store is selling a metal box containing green tea from China called “le thé Mai 68” and adorned with slogans (including: “poetry is in the streets” and “imagination to power”). Described as “subtly perfumed with exotic fruits, grapefruit, bits of lemon peel and rose petals,” Fauchon calls it “the tea with the perfume of revolution.” Price: about $23.50.

Works Cited: Steven Erlander, "Barricades of May '68 Still Divide the French," The New York Times, April 30, 2008.

Video Art 9 - Vito Acconci, Centers (1971) [Excerpt]

Is over six thousand YouTube views (in about eighteen months) for a classic of early seventies video art a lot or a little? The full video runs for about twenty minutes. Acconci's position does not change.

The guy who uploaded all these classic Acconci clips deserves a prize.

Works Cited: Rosalind Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism," October 1 (Spring 1976), p. 50-64.

Cage to Boulez

"Let them build whatever walls; someone will always be getting out."

- John Cage to Pierre Boulez in a letter dated May 1, 1953

Works Cited: Branden Joseph, "The Tower and the Line: Toward a Genealogy of Minimalism," Grey Room 27 (Spring 2007), p. 58-81.