[spectre] (fwd) Variant 29 Summer 2007?

Thu Jun 28 01:55:47 CEST 2007

Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 12:30:35 +0100
Subject: Variant 29 Summer 2007?
From: "www.variant.org.uk" <variantmag at btinternet.com>

Variant 29 Summer 2007
http://www.variant.org.uk
...the free, independent, arts magazine. In-depth coverage
in the context of broader social, political & cultural issues.

text : full issue
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/issue29.html
PDF : full issue
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/0Variant29.pdf

Content

* Who Are You to tell me to Question Authority?
Radical education in a 'proto-fascist' era
Benjamin Franks
A comprehensive review of Henry Giroux's 'Against the New 
Authoritarianism', a well-researched polemic that identifies the 
threat of authoritarianism in the nexus of hierarchical institutions 
that have formed in the United States, where the images from Abu 
Ghraib provide Giroux with a significant set of 'proto-fascist' texts 
for discussing the wider social processes that produced them.

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/Franks29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/3Variant29Frank.pdf

* Closed Circuit Tunnel Vision
Tom Jennings
An incisive review of Andrea Arnold's Glasgow-set film, the suspense 
thriller 'Red Road'. Jennings posits that Arnold in intending to 
question the ramifications of surveillance in Britain "explains the 
apparent acceptance of the state's intrusiveness in terms of 'our 
national psyche'". A reference which he details as being beyond 
current affairs' hysterical hyperbole and the film's erstwhile 
critical reception.

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/jennings29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/4Variant29Jennings.pdf

* Comic & Zine Reviews
Mark Pawson
Pawson opens the eclectic pages of: Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns,
Duke, Anorak, Okido, Street Play, Tour de Fence, Here, Foie Gras, I 
Can't Draw, Your Mum, Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in 
All Fifty States...

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/pawson29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/5Variant29Pawson.pdf

* 'Reframing the Poverty Debate' the New Labour Way
Gerry Mooney
"Poverty is back on the agenda, but back on it in particular and very 
worrying ways. ... how poverty is defined, understood and talked 
about says much about the shape and nature of any policy and 
political response to it." Here, Mooney draws "attention to some of 
the ways in which the question of poverty is being reconstructed by 
New Labour and an assortment of journalists, academics and social and 
political commentators today." And rather than a "neo-liberal vision 
of social justice premised on a celebration of the market" advances 
"an entirely different conception and understanding of social justice 
that argues for social and economic equality through an attack on 
wealth and vested interests."

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/mooney29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/6Variant29Mooney.pdf

* The Agreed Truth & The Real Truth: The New Northern Ireland
Liam O'Ruairc
"The 'historic' restoration of devolution in Northern Ireland, on 8 
May 2007, has been hailed by the media as marking the symbolic end of 
the conflict there. ... But is Northern Ireland really 'reaping the 
dividend of peace, stability and, it is to be hoped, impending 
prosperity' as the media is assuring us? And if so is it going to 
last" when "Northern Ireland has the lowest household incomes in the 
UK ... the gap between rich and poor is even larger than in the rest 
of Britain" and "Sectarianism is supposed to be solved by a system 
that institutionalises it."

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/liam29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/7Variant29Liam.pdf

* Multiple Agendas, Impossible Dialogues: Where Irish Studies and 
History of Art Meet
Lucy Cotter
Blow-by-blow conference report of 'Irish Studies and History of Art: 
Impossible Dialogues?' at the Association of Art Historians 2007 
conference, University of Ulster, April 2007: "The main point of 
tension in such an interdisciplinary dialogue is the function and 
status of the national - which is central to Irish Studies and often 
seen as reductive in Art History."

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/cotter29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/8Variant29IrishStudies.pdf

* Loving Art
Tim Stott
Irish art criticism not contracted to the laborious recovery of 
meaning, or that puts interpretation in the service of promotion and 
general arts management, might engage instead in the intimate 
exchanges of lovers...

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/stott29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/9Variant29Stott.pdf

* Art School and the Old Grey Cardigan Test
Mick Wilson
There is a "topicality to the question of art education even within 
the mainstream of the international art world." But "within art 
education institutions established patterns of low-level conflict 
fail to pass over into open, critically accountable debate, dialogue 
or exchange. ... Many of the self-avowed bearers of the art school 
'tradition' have been absorbed into an old grey cardigan kind of 
comfortable though miserable institutionalisation. The painful irony 
is that rehearsing matters in this way risks closing down the very 
discussion one is demanding..."

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/wilson29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/10Variant29Grey.pdf

* The Critique of Everyday Life and Cultural Democracy
Alex Law
An unfolding review of John Roberts' study of the possibilities for 
cultural democracy 'Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary 
Practice and the Fate of Cultural Theory', sixty years of critical 
theorising between 1917 and 1975 about everyday life and a conflicted 
reality, a more activist sense on which to hook a democratic cultural 
politics for today. Markedly, Law concentrates on Roberts' deepening 
excavation on the submerged figure, at least for cultural politics, 
of Henri Lefebvre.

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/law29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/11Variant29Law.pdf

* Killing Culture (Softly)
Stephen Dawber
The draft Culture (Scotland) Bill was not negligible. It marked a 
dramatic recomposition of the relationship between the Scottish state 
apparatus and its cultural agencies: stronger centralised state 
control of cultural policy; mounting bureaucratisation across the 
sector; the branding of national culture for promotional gain; an 
insidious instrumentalisation of cultural practice and erosion of 
creative freedoms; and a commitment to declining state funding and 
increased privatisation. Dawber sets out the key tasks for cultural 
workers to recover cultural policy from the miasma of technocracy in 
which it has become lost...

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/dawber29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/12Variant29Dawb.pdf

* O Rose, thou art sick!
Outsourcing Glasgow's Cultural & Leisure Services
On April Fools' Day , Glasgow City councillors rushed through the 
removal of the City's entire Cultural and Leisure Services and staff 
from the control of the people and delivered them into the hands of 
bankers: the Charitable Trust and Trading Company 'Culture and Sport 
Glasgow'. Drawing on UNISON and activist sources this is an otherwise 
missing public account of the hiving off of Glasgow's common good.

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/commons29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/13Variant29Common.pdf

* Adult Educators, Adult Education and Progressive Social Movements
Gordon Asher interviews Stephen Brookfield, one of the pre-eminent 
writers and thinkers in the field of adult and continuing education 
and active participant in social movements. "When you create 
democratic space, which means that you as the teacher are not the 
sole source of authority, you're starting to question the power of 
certain individuals in the college or the university to make 
judgements about whether the learning is valuable or not. Then you 
come right up against the issue of power and who has the right to 
make these judgements, which brings you up against the issue of 
social structure..."

text :
http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/edu29.html
PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/14Variant29AdultEd.pdf

* Front cover
Jonathan Owen and Neil Grassie

PDF :
http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue29/1Variant29cover.pdf

-----------------------------
Call for articles:

Creative Industries
...to develop critical understanding and to broaden public discussion 
about 'Creative Industries' as a key aspect of contemporary policy 
that is presumed to address inequality. Full details: 
http://www.variant.org.uk/CI.html

-----------------------------
Associated Events:

* Radical Independent Book fair project - Glasgow
NEXT event:
Sat 4th August, Kinning Park complex, next to Underground, 11am onwards
http://www.ribproject.org
rib at angryartworks.com

* Document 5 : International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival
Call for Submissions - Deadline : 1st July 2007
http://www.docfilmfest.org.uk

-----------------------------
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-----------------------------
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Variant, ISSUE 30 - Winter 2007
Advertising Copy Date: Friday 14th September
Publication Date: Monday 1st October
Covers: October '07 to and including January '08

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