The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest has launched its 9th issue on the web (print edition will appear in September, 2014).
Gabriel Saloman’s essay On Hiatus: The Imminent Impossibility of the Art Strike appears alongside articles by Brendan Bayler, David Buuck, Zach Blas, Paula Govo-Guevara, duskin drum, Andrea Feigenbaum, Dr. Fabian Frenzel, Sarah Lewison, Patrick McCurdy, Not An Alternative, Heath Schultz, Michael W. Wilson & the editors of JoAaP.
http://www.joaap.org/issue9/9toc.htm
Between the rising seas and increasing valuation we find some sort of home. Among the memories of what we thought impossible and came to eventually be. A footstep crosses one thousand footfalls of the six-footed ant yet they each go the same distance.
Issue 9 (nine) of this here Journal of A & P, we editors wondered at the length of the day in order to understand what was really there. It had grown accustomed to the loud alarm and the cold morning air that it insisted upon entering half dressed. A morning shower was no longer of interest, the day always started too soon and coffee had finally become something to step on until lunch. If work came by, it could be admired as much as hated because it had finally become just a tool towards some other unknown eventuality. Cooking, on the other hand was alchemical; a real opportunity to actually mix things up and an opportunity to make little chances of delight, “If it tastes good swallow it, if not, spit it out.”
Occupy, Gezi Park, the Arab Spring, 15M. A now typical mantra, or perhaps a mumble or a shout. To suggest that these things did not happen and that each doesn’t continue to happen is to imagine that water only happens when its raining. Or maybe its best to suggest that these events didn’t happened in our sleep so that we might better understand our waking day, a day which is made up of our own Gezi Parks, or looking for jobs, or complaining about prices, or making a friend or deciding that Duggerz is full of shit and you’ll never shop there regardless of how ineffective a boycott may be.
We won’t pretend to know the genealogy of the term “the state of affairs,” (1) a wonderful philosophical term which is used to describe the totality of necessary relations set in play between any historic moment’s material conditions and its pre-existing modes of production. This ninth issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest floats in this state of affairs and wonders. How, now that we deeply understand that history does occur, that change does or does not happen, that massive disobedience is possible, that the scope of anti-capitalist cultural production has blossomed, that drones and police violence and the Koch Brothers exist to laugh at the massive odds against them… how does an artist and activist pace out a practice of social change?
– from the introduction by the editors of JoAaP
Diadem Discos & Library 