Tag Archives: #meltedaway

The Truth Will Set You Free

At the end of 2017, one year into the Trump presidency, the familiar begins to escape us.

The Autocrat's Language

"Using words to lie destroys language. Using words to cover up lies, however subtly, destroys language. Validating incomprehensible drivel with polite reaction also destroys language. This isn’t merely a question of the prestige of the writing art or the credibility of the journalistic trade: it is about the basic survival of the public sphere.

In Russia, first they came for the words of politics, value, and passion. Then they came for the words of action, the words that describe buildings, the numbers that denote dates. And then there were no words left to speak. Not that this is a Russian phenomenon.

Here is what Confucius had to say on the topic:

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything."

-- Masha Gessen, The Autocrat's Language, NYRDaily

RSS What Donald Trump Says

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Live Stream January 20, 2018

TRUTH BE TOLD – unveiled at 3 PM, January 20, 2018, first anniversary of the Trump inauguration, at Jim Kempner Fine Art 501 West 23 Street, NY, NY, streaming live until it’s gone.

This is the sixth in a series we’ve done since 2006. The temporary monuments of Melted Away are markers for the opening decades of the 21st century – first, DEMOCRACY is broken, then, the ECONOMY ruined; the MIDDLE CLASS disappears, THE FUTURE is tenuous, THE AMERICAN DREAM vanishes, and TRUTH remains an open question.

Site is visible from the street at all times, 24/7. We will be streaming LIVE for the duration, at meltedaway.com, on Facebook Live and on a network of galleries in North America. (Participating venues listed below.) Comments welcome – on Twitter @melted_away, Instagram @meltedaway, and on the Facebook Live feed.

The work will last for days, one week, possibly longer, in an almost imperceptible disintegration that belies the force and speed at which the current administration is attempting to undermine the basic concepts of our nation’s history and governance.

Jim Kempner Fine Art is located at 501 West 23 Street, corner of 10 Avenue and 23 Street.

Thanks to net neutrality the entirety of TRUTH BE TOLD is streaming at these galleries, universities, institutions and museums:

  • ArtsEverywhere
  • Catharine Clark Gallery
  • Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida
  • Eyebeam
  • Harbourfront Centre
  • Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Digital Art/New Media MFA Program of UC Santa Cruz Arts Division
  • Nevada Museum of Art
  • San Francisco Art Institute
  • San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art
  • Streaming Museum
  • Division of Media Arts + Practice, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
  • University of Texas at Austin Department of Art
  • Washington University, St. Louis, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
On Location with Streaming Partners

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Beauty In The Political

Mira Schor

Each letter melts in its own pattern of crystalline decomposition.

The Future

What is one to make of the role of beauty?  All the tiny bubbles that in this particular piece of ice, in the T of F U T U R E are a source of the joy that visual pleasure can bring, as it creates an unclear window romanticizing anew the Flat Iron building seen through it. Can this function as a political image? This of course is not the piece, it is a detail of the piece, but the piece is not just one image with a metaphor of glaciers melting in the warming atmosphere of earth, the piece also creates a series of images, changing over time. Their beauty is seductive, but does the metaphor operate metonymically or does one need the entire narrative?

The Future

(the future has melted in the hour or so since I took that picture, it is melting fast)

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controversies

Mira Schor

I’ve been tweeting pictures of the melting ice letters of T H E  F U T U R E, LigoranoReese’s Dawn of the Anthropocene. One angry tweet asks much GHCs were emitted to create that ice and accuses me of hating this planet!

The question of the carbon footprint of this project is a fair one. This is a quandary: an idea which creates an potentially useful image for a cause may use energy in a not absolutely ecologically correct manner appropriate to the cause, although in the larger scheme of things, thinking of the major sources of global warming, this is a relatively minor infraction though perhaps one that must be judged by the standards of the cause. But I did wonder about this question myself.

However I’d like to point out that I am here as an invited observer. This is not my art work.

One could say that this is a descriptive piece or a documentary one, mirroring or replicating problematics of the culture, where everything that is done for the good as for the bad may have unintended consequences and it is hard to get off the grid to a perfect state of original nature.

Speaking to Marshall Reese about this question, he agrees that these are tough issues, legitimate issues. “These blocks of ice have a lot of energy inside them, it took electricity to make them, to freeze them, power tools use electricity, refrigeration, a tremendous amount of energy, but also hundreds of people have been here today.” Reese and his collaborator Nora Ligorano hope that the piece poses a question of if there will be a future, they hope it will make people stop and think about the future. Of course they wish it could be greener and know that living as an artist in New York, in a Northern hemisphere country, there is the luxury of having these resources and the temptation to use them. They hope to create a piece that will help people see things as a commonality, the minutiae of energy used is another issue.

As Reese points out, if one followed a purist reasoning in this matter, they wouldn’t just not make this sculpture in this material, but they wouldn’t do many things, including fly places, work on computers, use iPhones, as many climate change activists do as a matter of professional course.

 

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