the anti-taboo magazine
issue 1
contents
Exposed Sensation LIST Rape Talk Ai Weiwei Fuck Off Plus Size TABOOS
-1Contents
Y S T R D I D STAR BA
e lanc r veil er. It u S , umm icit rism o ye u r n t h i s s t h e e x p l h V : ode wit osed out Exp Tate M or with ying y. p d s e l l f t a ly o a ur o wd o w c opened e ptitious histor y h h s C w a ada sur r was the A ne e Camer y Sh ade t B m I h . t . s s t e and d ima g b j e c t o g ra p h he su re t ho u t f a o fe 50 p 2 ion s r s e i v per m in just o s n e al
-2Article: EXPOSED
-3Article: EXPOSED
But there was an elephant in the museum. Moving from room to room laid out with videos and photographs by the likes of Walker Evans and Bruce Nauman, looking up into the corners, what did you see? The Tate’s own CCTV. “When people go into a gallery, they expect to be watched. There’s a lot of expensive work here and it has to be protected,” said Simon Baker, Tate’s new curator of photography. Well, it obviously works for the French. By failing to directly address the security setup in the Tate Modern’s own halls, they undermined what was otherwise a beautiful, intelligent and informed show. The Tate had accepted that we’re indifferent to living under the gaze of a Panopticon and was wholly complicit in it.
-4Article: EXPOSED
No one knows how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK. Best estimations put the number at 5m, or one camera for every 12 people. That’s 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras on a whingey North Sea island. It used to be that we were only six feet away from a rat. Now we’re only six feet away from a camera. The exhibition showcased everything from super-secret American military bases, aerial landscapes of the Kuwaiti oil fields after the first Gulf War to people dogging in cars. It showed the theft of privacy and questioned the basic notion of privacy. Early photographic subjects were ignorant as to what was happening to them. Faces of people in early
albumen prints resembled a deer in headlights, unsure what that man behind a box with a cloth on his head was doing. Ignorance became acceptance as the power of the camera became a tool for the media and the state. We grew aware of the gaze. A photograph of the artist Edgar Degas leaving a pissoir echoed its way to a photograph of Paris Hilton crying pathetically in the back of a police car on her way to jail. A surveillance photograph of militant suffragettes used by police in 1913 bore an uncanny resemblance to modern police spotter cards used to identify “potential troublemakers” at demonstrations.
indifference to surveillance. The Tate boasted of the show’s timeliness “due to the increasing availability and use of street surveillance and mobile phones”. It celebrated and attacked our voyeuristic culture.
Launching the show in London highlighted and mocked our current
But where was Wikileaks’ Collateral Murder video? Curators say that it’s
If you felt dirty viewing Gilles Peress’s images of the Rwandan genocide, you should’ve. If you were captivated by Merry Alpern’s sneaked shots through a bordello’s window, brilliant. If you felt the horror in Jonathan Olley’s photo of a static oppression palace, the Gold Five Zero watchtower in South Armagh, good. You were meant to be shocked, and you were meant to think.
-5Article: EXPOSED
a testament to the strength of the show’s message that everyone who went could think of other things that should’ve also featured. Not having the most current and devastating piece of surveillance in the public domain in a show that purports to provide a “provocative perspective” on the “iconic and taboo” was negligent. The show was not so much timely, but backtimed. It uses history and reflection in the hope people will be clever enough to flesh out topical issues the Tate is too cowardly to tackle head-on. It was politicisation by proxy. Then again, The Tate is a bit slow. They only opened a modern art museum 10 years ago.
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-6Article: SENSATION
ion It’s been a lucky 13 years for Charles Saatchi since work from his YBA collection made up the Sensation exhibition, so whats next from British Art, and would Sensation still shock now? Paul Martin-Jones explores. -7Article: SENSATION
For many art lovers, the Sensation exhibition of 1997 was a cultural disaster akin to the sack of Rome. The Royal Academy, home for over 200 years to the nation’s most accomplished artists, was given up to the shock troops of Britart, with Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Marcus Harvey to the fore. Chief of the Visigoths was Charles Saatchi, whose collection made up the show — to some a fearless champion of contemporary taste, to others its arch villain. Twelve years is a blink of an eye in the history of art, but for those at its cutting edge it’s a lifetime. The enfants terribles have become elder statesmen complaining of 50% tax rates; collectors who jumped on the Saatchi bandwagon have suffered serious reversals, among them Steven Cohen, the American hedge-fund billionaire who paid £6.5m for Damien Hirst’s shark in 2005, and whose recent decision to show $450m worth of art from his collection at Sotheby’s New York was seen as a desperate attempt to shore up its value.
-8Article: SENSATION
“When he started going to their early shows in 1990, the situation both here and in New York was desperate,” remembers one long-term associate. “There were very few collectors, we didn’t have Tate Modern, and galleries were closing left, right and centre; so from then until 1994-5 he had very little competition and was able to clean up. Since then so many more important players have emerged that his influence has inevitably diminished. If Newspeak doesn’t have the same impact as Sensation, it will be because the cultural landscape has changed so much. Having said that, he still has an enormous appetite for art. He simply loves it: when he comes into a gallery and sees something he likes, his whole body language changes. He’s done a huge amount for art, and not just in Britain.”
Though he was recently demoted to No 72 in ArtReview magazine’s annual “Power 100” list, Saatchi’s continuing ability to hit the jackpot was shown by Christie’s autumn sale of contemporary art. Two paintings from his collection, Martin Kippenberger’s Paris Bar and Kellner Des…(Waiter Of…), stole the show by fetching £2.28m and £1.1m respectively: double their estimates. If Saatchi follows his usual game plan, this money will be invested in work by relatively unknown artists. “He is very good at spotting new talent,” says Bridget Brown, who advises companies on investing in art. “When an interesting new artist has a show you always see him there, and he arrives early. He often picks them up when they’re with young dealers. He does sometimes miss a trick — he bought Peter Doig very late in the day — but not often. He’s an obsessive and acquisitive person; to be a collector of that status you have to be.” Can he, though, create an art superstar single-handedly? Brown says not. “It isn’t simply a question of a collector buying low and selling high — an awful lot goes on in between, with dealers working very carefully to develop artists’ careers. Critics, museum directors and curators all play a huge part.” Hirst may have risen faster than most, but this was thanks to his business sense and genius for selfpromotion rather than any Saatchi-assisted short cuts.
-9Article: SENSATION
So what effect will Newspeak’s visit to St Petersburg have on the Russian art world? Saatchi blazed the trail by sending USA Today, an exhibition of new American art from his collection, to the Hermitage last year. A London-based Russian dealer who wishes to remain anonymous sees these moves as a brilliant strategy for tapping into a highly lucrative aspirational market. “There is a cabal of curators, critics and gallery owners who want the world to believe that Russian collectors are among the most important on the international scene,” he says. “That simply isn’t true at the moment: Roman Abramovich may have paid £43m for Francis Bacon’s Triptych last year, but it was an ill-advised purchase made at the top of the market. However, it could prove a self-fulfilling prophecy — and if those collectors buy from Saatchi or even just push the market up, he’s going to do extremely well out of it.”
- 10 LIST
25 BANNED BOOKS YOU HAVE TO READ by Mel Pietersen
- 11 LIST
Title: A Day No Pigs Would Die Author: Robert Newton Peck This coming of age story by Robert Newton Peck is one of the all-time most challenged books. People just can’t seem to get past the graphic description of animal butchery. The scene where Robert pins down his pig Pinky while his dad slaughters him caused particular problems, causing it to be 16th in the most challenged books of the 1990s.
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Title: American Psycho Author: Bret Easton Ellis After writing a novel about a self-proclaimed serial killer, Bret Easton Ellis received a massive amount of hate mail and numerous death threats. In some countries, American Psycho cannot be purchased by anyone who is under 18. The blinding of a tramp, killing of a child and eating of a dead prostitute are just some of the depictions of violence.
Title: And Tango Makes Three Author: Peter Parnell, Justin Richardson Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s picture book about two penguins enraged homophobes enough to be named the most challenged book of 2006, 2007, 2008 and the most banned of 2009. The authors themselves dispute these claims and said “We wrote the book to help parents teach children about same-sex parent families. It’s no more an argument in favor of human gay relationships than it is a call for children to swallow their fish whole”
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Title: Annie on my Mind Author: Nancy Garden
A Kansas School Board was so eager to get this novel, which depicts a lesbian relationship between two teenagers, off the school shelves that they deliberately violated the First Amendment and went head-to-head with a judge. It was also named one of the top 100
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influential books of the 20th Century.
Title: Fallen Angels Author: Dean Myers
Walter Dean Myers’ novel about a group of young American soldiers in the Vietnam War has incensed so many people that it earned a place on the American Library’s Association’s list of the most frequently challenged books due to its use of profanity and its realistic depiction of war.
- 12 LIST
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Title: Bridge to Terabithia Author: Katherine Paterson Author Katherine Patterson is the daughter of missionaries and the wife of a minister, but that hasn’t stopped people from saying that her book, Bridge to Terabithia promotes Satanism through references to magic. That doesn’t stop it being studied for English Studies classes in over 10 countries.
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Title: Candide Author: Voltaire
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U.S. Customs officials used to seize Voltaire’s critically hailed satire. Apparently, they were not fans of his merciless take on religion, philosophy and government. Voltaire himself was so worried about the reception the book would receive that when it was written in 1759 he used the pseudonym Doctor Ralph.
Title: Forever Author: Judy Blume Judy Blume was one of the first authors to write candidly about a teenage girl who is sexually active, and she’s been the subject of criticism ever since. Her book, Forever, is a constant target of religious and sexual abstinence groups who don’t think teenagers should read about a girl who goes on ‘the pill.’
Title: Frankenstein Author: Mary Shelley
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Title: Fanny Hill Author: John Cleland
Mary Shelley’s classic book about a man obsessed with creating new life was banned in several countries for being indecent, objectionable and obscene. Written when she was 18, it was meant as a warning against the expansion of man in the Industrial Revolution.
The U.S Supreme Court did not clear 1749’s Fanny Hill (also known as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) from obscenity charges until 1966. People complained about the book’s blunt sexual descriptions and the way it parodied contemporary literature. It is considered the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of a novel. - 13 LIST
Title: Harry Potter (Entire Series) Author: JK Rowling Anti-witchcraft proponents everywhere hate the Harry Potter series with a passion. Their main complaints involve Harry’s use of magic, but his nasty habit of standing up to authority figures does not go over well, either. Hasn’t stopped Rowling becoming richer than the Queen however.
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Title: Lady Chatterley’s Lover Author: D.H Lawrence D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel was the subject of numerous obscenity trials in the UK, the U.S. and other countries up into the 1960s. Objections were raised about the book’s explicit sex scenes and use of taboo four-letter words.
12 Title: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Author: Maya Angelou Maya Angelou’s autobiography is one of the most challenged books ever. Some of the controversial issues include drug abuse, profanity and a brutal rape scene. The book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two years after its realise in 1969.
Title: Lord of the Flies Author: William Golding
Title: Of Mice and Men Author: John Steinbeck
William Golding’s bestselling novel, Lord of Flies, is considered to be one of the best English-language novels of the 1900s. Nevertheless, the book’s stance on subjects of human nature has made it a frequent target of censors. Only selling 3000 copies in its first year, it has gone on to become required in schools and an international bestseller.
John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men, is another of the all-time most challenged books. People criticizing the book often cite offensive and vulgar language. The title originates from a Robert Burns poem which reads: “The best laid plans of Mice and Men go oft awry.”
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Title: Silas Marner Author: George Eliot
George Eliot’s novel about a reclusive old man redeemed by an orphan girl he raises was controversial when it was first released and is still banned as far as some school districts are concerned.
- 14 LIST
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Title: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Author: Mark Twain Mark Twain’s classic tale about the journey of Huck and his friend Jim is yet another of the most challenged books ever. It became especially controversial throughout the 20th Century for its use of the word “Nigger”.
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Title: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Author: Mark Twain
Although this book isn’t nearly as controversial as Twain’s other novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer has been barred frequently from schools and libraries alike. Title:
The Arabian Nights
Author: Various
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Title: The Catcher in The Rye Author: JD Salinger
There are various versions of The Arabian Nights stories and most have been banned at one point or another. To this day there is still a law on the books to prevent the mailing of this book in the U.S.; however, the law is no longer enforced. The collection contains such well-known stories as “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp”, “Ali Baba and his Forty Theives” and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”.
People have been banning J.D. Salinger’s novel since its publication in 1951. The censorship stems from the book’s profanity and anti-Christian sentiments. Main character Holden Caulfield’s red hat has also been seen by many as an allusion to communism, causing its ban at the time of the Vietnam War.
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Title: The Chocolate War Author: Robert Cormier
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People have been objecting and banning this book since its publication in 1974. Chief complaints involve the 200+ swear words that appear in the story and the scenes that depict violence and masturbation.
Title: The Color Purple Author: Alice Walker
Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has been challenged and banned around the world for its graphic violence and sexuality. It’s the 17th most challenged book of the last decade.
- 15 LIST
23 Title: The Giver Author: Lois Lowry
Also known by its nickname, ‘the suicide book,’ Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel is the most commonly banned book in middle school libraries.
Title: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders Author: Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel of an irrepressible woman leading a desperate life was banned for lewdness and indecency. What’s ironic about this is that Defoe left out the dirtiest of details to make sure he would stay out of jail once Moll Flanders was published.
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Title: Ulysses Author: James Joyce Ulysses has been called the 20th century’s best novel. It has also been called the most vulgar, obscene and blasphemous book ever to be banned in the U.S.
- 16 LIST
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- 17 LIST
LO - 18 Article: RAPE TALK
OL t he rise and rise of rape talk by kira cochrane
- 19 Article: RAPE TALK
IT’S GONNA BE MORE ONESIDED THAN A GANG RAPE DAVID HAYE
- 20 Article: RAPE TALK
He was given every chance to apologise. But on the Today programme yesterday, the world heavyweight champion, David Haye, seemed unrepentant. On Tuesday, publicising his upcoming bout against Audley Harrison, he promised to “violate” his opponent, adding that the match would be as “one-sided as a gang rape”. A wave of criticism crashed over him, and on Thursday, when asked by a Today presenter whether he would like to issue a mea culpa, and address his allusions to rape, Haye ducked the question and simply offered this strange explanation: “You’ll have to wait and see the fight first,” he said, “I’m talking about the one-sidedness of the fight.” He wasn’t actually going to gang rape Harrison, he added, which was certainly good to know. By dodging an apology, Haye implied he hadn’t said anything wrong, that there was no need to express regret; indeed, earlier this week he tweeted: “If I apologised for every stupid/ignorant thing I said, I wouldn’t have time for anything else during the day!” And, in some ways, Haye’s jovial, unapologetic response isn’t surprising. After all, the use of the word “rape” to describe all kinds of bad experience – from getting beaten up in a boxing match, to having your hairdo completely ruined – has recently become usual, average, shruggable. Just as the word “gay” has been twisted by pop culture, used to refer to someone or something a bit uncool, the word “rape” is now regularly used where “nightmare” or an apt expletive would previously have been in order. An example of so-called rape talk? Coming out of an exercise class recently, a guy turned to one of my friends, sweating and breathless, and heaved a sigh of satisfied exhaustion. “Wow, that was just like being raped, wasn’t it?” he said. My friend stood motionless, blinking back at him. Another? In the July issue of UK Elle, the Twilight star Kristen Stewart talked about being trailed by the paparazzi, saying that when she sees the resulting photographs: “I feel like I’m looking at someone being raped.” (Stewart later apologised for the comparison). Online, there has been a lot of talk about “Facebook rape”: a term used to describe a third party getting access to someone’s Facebook account and changing their details. Almost 1.3 million people are fans of the Facebook page “Thanks wind, you have totally raped my hair”, where photos of windswept women are posted. And the rightwing US shock jocks, always ahead of the crowd with vile, vicious language, have been using rape talk for years. In separate discussions of healthcare reform last year, Rush Limbaugh warned his listeners, “get ready to get gang-raped again”, while Glenn Beck compared himself and his viewers to “the young girl saying, ‘No, no, help me,’” while “the government is Roman Polanski”.
Another part of this phenomenon is the popularity of out-andout rape jokes. I had an idea there was a taboo against these, but I realised how wrong I was last year when I attended an amateur comedy showcase that a friend was compering. There were about a dozen acts, and almost all included material making light of attacks on women. It’s never a good sign when an evening ends with you and your friends bellowing, “No more rape jokes! No more rape jokes!” from the back of a bemused crowd. After the performance, my friend said the comedians had been amazed anyone would object. Everyone else they had delivered the material to had apparently found it absolutely hilarious, she said, a ribald delight. It’s not surprising those amateur comedians were nonplussed: rape talk is commonplace on the professional circuit. In his show at the Edinburgh festival last year, in the midst of some material about drink-driving, Ricky Gervais said: “I’ve done it once and I’m really ashamed of it. It was Christmas - I’d had a couple of drinks and I took the car out. But I learned my lesson. I nearly killed an old lady. In the end I didn’t kill her. In the end, I just raped her.” Geddit? (Me neither.) Russell Howard jokes about “yawn rape”, someone sticking their finger into a yawning mouth – not as offensive as the Gervais joke, but still a strange use of the word, no? Then there’s Jimmy Carr, who said in an interview in this paper last year: “I happen to think the construct of ‘99% of women kiss with their eyes closed, which is why it’s so difficult to identify a rapist’ is funny. It’s not really about the act of serious sexual assault. You have to go out of your way to take offence over, ‘I bought a rape alarm because I kept on forgetting when to rape people’”. It might be argued that the reason people makes jokes about rape, or use the word to describe something small and throwaway, is because they recognise it is among the worst things that can happen to a person, and therefore anticipate an exciting frisson of shock. To say that the wind “raped your hair” is to apply the incredibly serious to the incredibly trivial, and the comedy is meant to bubble up through that disjuncture, that mire of exaggeration. That’s the defence. The result, this writer would suggest, is simple: when you use rape in jokes, or as a glib aside about the terrible sandwich you ate at lunch, you’re suggesting the crime just isn’t very serious. As Sandy Brindley, national co-ordinator of Rape Crisis Scotland, says: “Rape is so particularly traumatic and so meaningful in so many ways, that there’s something about using the word in other contexts that diminishes the reality of it, and the impact it has on women’s lives. Rape is a powerful word, and it’s powerful for a reason, because of that devastating impact.”
- 21 Article: RAPE TALK
- 22 Issue 1: ARTS
The Art of
- 23 Article: AI WEIWEI
Ai WeiWei As crowds converged for the opening of the Beijing Olympics, their expectation turned into a collective gasp as a red glow appeared from within the stadium known universally as the Bird’s Nest. The building was the showpiece of the Games – and therefore of modern China. Entwining momentum with sturdiness, chaos with order, its vortex of 42,000 tonnes of steel latticework is a marvel of imagination and engineering, one of the great new buildings in the world. How strange, then, that when it came to meeting Ai Weiwei, the man who designed it, he turned out to be a gentle, thoughtful, but bear-like man. The architects of the stadium, Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland, called him the project’s “creative consultant”, but Ai said, characteristically, of his role: “I don’t need a title – I would prefer ‘the Untitled’.”
The timing of Ai exhibiting in London could not be more fortuitous: his installation opens four days after the Nobel peace prize committee in Stockholm had shown itself less enamoured of China’s regime than politicians and businessmen when awarding the prize to imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo. Ai is based in a studio complex in a peculiar and intriguing corner of Beijing. 798 Arts Zone and the series of studios beyond it constitute a cranny where old streets and buildings have been spared by the bulldozer and turned into a kind of trendy theme park in which the authorities seem not only to permit but – unusually for them – encourage cultural activity. This is where the pavement cafes are found, along with art galleries and boutiques that sell Mao chic clothing (silk dressing gowns printed with pictures of the Red Guard). His father was Ai Qing, a painter and China’s leading poet, who had worked in Paris and was influenced by Gogol and Dostoevsky. He was first imprisoned - as a communist -
- 24 Article: AI WEIWEI
by the nationalist regime and then as a dissident during Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution.
“found myself among friends, artistically – I wanted to stay forever”.
In 1967, when Ai was 10, Ai Qing and his family were exiled to a hard labour camp in a remote village at Xinjiang, in the Gobi desert. “There,” says Ai, “my father was punished by being made to clean the public toilets for five years. He was beaten and kept in very severe physical deprivation.” Ai Qing died in 1996.
But in 1993, when his father fell ill, Ai returned to China despite his green card, establishing a studio called East Village, then his current one, Real/Fake – an oblique pun on the name of an exhibition he staged in Shanghai called Fuck Off . There, his installations included painting a Coca-Cola label on to an ancient Han vase and dropping another to smash it, a photograph of which featured on the cover of a book entitled So Sorry.
Such an upbringing obviously moulded the artist Ai became. “I know what I know,” Ai says, “because, as a child, I have seen the opposite of freedom. I have seen many people killed, the results of stupidity and cruelty, and the results of courage.” In 1978, Ai enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy, before founding an avant garde circle called the Stars. In his third year, in 1981, Ai won a scholarship to go to the US, working in New York’s East Village, where he lived for 12 years and,
Another part of the studio’s programme involved Ai’s wife, Lu Qing, lifting up her skirt and showing her knickers to the portrait of Chairman Mao that presides over Tiananmen Square along with modern China’s other icons, Nike and Valentino. These antics were not to the taste of every artist on the Chinese fringe, some now seeking to acknowledge and explain, rather than challenge, the new economic order.
- 25 Article: AI WEIWEI
One critic, Xu Bing, told the New Yorker: “These things [Ai’s installations] are not without value”, but although China “still has a lot of problems, like the disparity between rich and poor… it really has solved many problems. China’s economy is developing so quickly – I’m interested in why this has happened. Not everyone can be like Ai Weiwei, because then China wouldn’t be able to develop, right?” It was a fine stroke by Herzog & de Meuron to turn Ai from rascal of the Chinese alternative into the muse for China’s second most recognisable monument after the Great Wall. It meant Ai could do what most Chinese cannot: speak his mind about the regime. On the eve of the Olympics, he said: “I feel outraged at the Chinese government and I am disgusted by the way power is abused in this country.” But the Olympics, were, “a good opportunity for greater transparency in China”. Ai’s problems with the regime continued, ironically, because of his greatest gift to Chinese prowess, the Bird’s Nest.
He’s never visited the building he inspired: “I have never been in a stadium in my life,” Ai says. “I doubt I will ever go into the Bird’s Nest.” He left Beijing for the Olympics, “not as a boycott – as some have said,” he explained. “I don’t want to have to talk about it all the time. I am much more interested in what is going to happen to [the stadium] after the Games. I would like it to become a place where people like to go, bring their children or can come for mass weddings, or maybe mass divorces or, best of all, to have barbecues together.’ But his critique goes much deeper than either slogans or subversive barbecues and is not restricted to China. It is in the stadium design itself: one of the most striking things about the Bird’s Nest is the way the latticework makes the arena open to the exterior. Many observed that this was a way of keeping the smog from settling, by admitting a breeze.
- 26 Article: AI WEIWEI
But there was another reason, too, Ai says. “It is intended to statement about the need for a more open society, open discussion, greater transparency. I don’t believe you can relate architecture to political statements, but architecture will always relate to ideology. And I do not see ideology as a matter of left and right, or east and west, any more. I see the tension in ideology,” he says, “as being between a more interesting state of mind and a more dreadful state of mind. The artist should be for the interesting against the dreadful.” Thinking of this kind makes Ai not only a great artist, but a thinker of the world’s next political and intellectual phase, beyond the turgid babble of contemporary politics. One of his recent tweets to 48,000 followers read: “One day people will wake up and find themselves unable to believe that we have been through an age of stupidity and humiliation”. His recent Study of Perspective features Ai’s middle finger stuck up at the White House and Tiananmen Square.
The Chinese authorities remain acutely aware of Ai’s complex and innovative heresy and in China, an “edgy” artist has to face greater challenges than mockery or dismissive critics. While he was exhibiting in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in August 2009, Ai’s hotel door was kicked down in the early hours by police goons who then beat him about the head. Ai’s “installation” in the province was a public list of more than 5,000 schoolchildren killed by the 2008 earthquake, based on door-to-door inquiries (the regime steadfastly refused to disclose how many lives were lost; it is a “national secret”). A month later, in Munich, Ai suffered a haemorrhage as a result of the blow. He was in the Bavarian capital to cover the walls of the Haus der Kunst with thousands of brightly coloured school backpacks spelling out Chinese characters quoting the lament of a mother of a dead child in Sichaun interviewed as part of Ai’s project: “She lived happily for seven years in this world.”
- 27 Article: AI WEIWEI
不 合 作 的OFF) 方式 (FUCK -exhibition-
- 28 Article: FUCK OFF
(( “Fuck Off” was a notorious art exhibition which ran alongside the Third Shanghai Biennale (2000), which itself was the city’s first attempt at a truly international survey of contemporary art. The exhibition’s title translates as “Uncooperative Approach” in Chinese, but the blunter English language sentiment was deemed preferable. The exhibition was held in an Eastlink Gallery warehouse by Feng Boyi and the 43-year-old Ai Weiwei, revered as something of a mage by young Chinese artists. Ai encapsulated Fuck Off’s artistic-curatorial attitude with one set of photos in which he gives the finger in turn to the White House, the Forbidden City and the viewer, and another in which he releases an ancient Han Dynasty Chinese vase that smashes to at his feet.
The exhibition included 46 avant-garde artists’ works: Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, Chen Lingyang, Chen Shaoxiong, Chen Yunquan, Ding Yi, Feng Weidong, Gu Dexin, He An, He Yunchang (in a color photograph as a bare-torsoed figure suspended from a crane by his ankles over a rushing river which he “cut” with the same knife he later used to knick himself in the arm),
Huang Lei, Huang Yan, Jin Lei, Li Wen, Li Zhiwang, Liang Yue, Liang Yue, Lin Yilin, Lu Chunsheng, Lu Qing, Meng Huang, Peng Yu, Peng Donghui, Qin Ga, Rong Rong, Song Dong, Sun Yuan (creator of Solitary Animal, a glass case containing an animal skeleton and--purportedly--enough poison gas to wipe out the show’s entire audience), Wang Bing, Wang Yin, Wang Chuyu (whose performance consisted of a four-day fast), Wang Xingwei, Wu Ershan, Xiao Yu, Xu Tan, Xu Zhen, Yang Yong, Yang Fudong, Yang Maoyuan, Zhang Zhenzhong, Yang Zhichao, Zhang Dali, Zhang Shengquan, Zheng Guogu, Zhu Ming (who floated down the Huangpu River in a plastic bubble wearing a diaper) and Zhu Yu.Chen Hao, Zheng Jishun and Song Tao, exhibited a video documenting their stroll through the city with blood leaking from plastic tubes that had been surgically inserted in the veins of their arms. A catalog of this exhibition has been published. It is a small black book with the simple title “FUCK OFF” on the cover. One of the most famous examples from this exhibition was the performance of “Eating People” by Zhu Yu. It consisted of a series of photographs of him cooking and eating what is alleged to be a human fetus. One picture, circulated on the internet via e-mail in 2001, provoked investigations by both the FBI and Scotland Yard. The piece’s cannibalistic theme caused a stir in Britain when Yu’s work was featured on a Channel 4 documentary exploring Chinese modern art in 2003. In response to the public reaction, Mr. Yu stated, “No religion forbids cannibalism. Nor can I find any law which prevents us from eating people. I took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it”. He claims that he used an actual fetus stolen from a medical school. The exhibition was closed by the Shanghai police before its closing date.
- 29 Article: FUCK OFF
fash last - 30 Article: PLUS SIZE
ion’s taboo by Tracey McVeigh
- 31 Article: PLUS SIZE
It has featured naked women on the cover and even actresses without makeup. But now a leading fashion magazine has created a real shock for France’s fashionistas by tackling the last taboo: plus-size models. The latest edition of French Elle is arriving on newsstands this weekend with a picture of model Tara Lynn wearing a white jumpsuit on the cover. Lynn is a plus-size model who sports, it says, “adorable belly fat” and inside appears with three other larger models for 32 pages of a “special edition” dedicated to plussize fashion. It comes a month after Italian Vogue launched an online section called “Vogue Curvy” dedicated to fashion and beauty for larger women. In January US glossy magazine V ran a plussize-themed edition featuring Lynn and other models under the headline “Curves ahead”. And last September the issue was again in the spotlight after British designer Mark Fast’s London show caused a storm when his stylist allegedly walked out over a decision to use larger models. Some see French Elle’s decision to challenge the national stereotype of slender, chic Parisian women as breaking down the last bastion of a super-slim aesthetic that has gripped the fashion world. However, many doubt that the French will ever accept a larger body as an
- 32 Article: PLUS SIZE
acceptable look and several fashion insiders told the Observer that the French Elle shoot was simply a “gimmick”, not a trend. Others disagree. Velvet d’Amour, a US model who lives in Paris, has conquered both fashion and TV at size 28. She has been a catwalk model for Gaultier and Galliano and is now a popular TV commentator. Shops and websites for larger women are becoming highly visible. Parisian fashion writer Sakina, whose blog Saks and the City is widely read, told the Observer that the Elle cover was a “wonderful initiative”. “It’s almost unbelievable to see such a huge magazine cover a real plus-size woman. Along with Vogue dedicating a section to curvy women, it’s the most shaking news I’ve seen,” she said. “Fashion has created a gap between itself and real women. From skinny, to curvy, to fat, the population is made of very different bodies and the contrast between the women represented in fashion or advertising has been so important that most women don’t feel good about themselves. I, too, have had body issues: I tried to fight what I genetically am because I always thought that being beautiful could never mean being curvy.” She added: “The fashion industry is evolving, but slowly. Elle is considered as a magazine that steps out for women, so I want to believe this is not only a one-off. The famously Parisian chic is a fashion spirit, certainly not a weight or a body shape.” Although far behind the US and the UK, the French are getting significantly bigger. Statistics show that 42% of French women are now classified as overweight or obese, while more than half the male population – 51% of French men – are officially overweight or obese. But one Parisian fashion industry insider, who did not want to be named, said French Elle was acting less out of desire for change than “to respond to the criticisms directed at them for showing only thin models”. He told the Observer: “It’s a gimmick. Having one edition that you fill with big girls is like world women’s day: one day a year is reserved for them and the rest of the time you go back to normal.” The capital’s fashion elite was far from changing its mind about bigger models, added the insider. “You know why? Because clothes don’t look as good on bigger people.” If the fashion magazines do not lose readers by using a diversity of models in all shapes and sizes, then the designers could find that change makes commercial sense, even if some steadfastly refuse to accept the aesthetics.
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- 34 Issue 1 ARTS
TABOOS - Friday is the Muslim day of Prayer so be particularly aware of adhering to your hosts rules
- Women, dress conservatively as not only is showing too much flesh disrespectful, but in certain areas you may attract more attention than you would like
- Men, walking around bare-chested is severely frowned upon
- Never cause somebody to lose face in front of somebody else. If you need to criticise, do it in a private place
- You may only shake a woman’s hand if she offers it first
- Keep the soles of your feet covered up and touching the floor
- There is strictly no tolerance of alcohol in public, not even at a business lunch
- If you are going to take photographs, ask the permission of anyone who could be mistakenly caught in the frame
- However, it is an offence to photograph any woman wearing traditional dress
- Homosexuality is strictly forbidden, and any public displays of affection can be punished with a jail sentence
- Try not to eat or drink in public during Ramadan
- 35 TABOOS: Dubai
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- 36 Issue 1 ARTS
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