CANADIAN ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-VANCOUVER:
BUT IS IT 'ART' ?:
Here's an interesting show from out Vancouver way coming up soon this month. A showing of anarchist propaganda "as an exhibit" put on by the Art and Anarchy group.
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Archived Resistance:
July 17 to August 8th
Gallery open Weds-Sun: 5:30 – 8:30
{please contact for daytime showings}
16 E. Hastings. Occupied Coast Salish Territories.
Captured from silence and reconfigured in the detonation of struggle. Archived Resistance is a show of force, of anarchist newsprints and anti-authoritarian/anti-colonial propaganda, collected from various terrains.
Artifacts on display, not to create a prison/museums, but to celebrate the symbols inscribed within the body memory of the Movement.
Articles, not exhumed to be revered and fetishised, -but to reflect our streams of resistance;
Streams, that when converge, form violent oceans beautiful enough to drowned this world of holocausts.
Bring what you can, zines, papers, posters, dreams; donate them to the cause, or- we will make copies of your treasures and pass those copies on to the Anarchist Archive {a digital universe of anarchist press}.
Coincided with an assortment of workshops, films, presentations, happenings. To find out when these take place check out this site or email artandanarchy2010@gmail.com .
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MOLLY NOTE:
I will not pretend to be an "art critic", and the above exhibit seems valuable in itself. I can see the point of such an exhibit, and it is entirely possible that some of the productions of our movement have more than historical interest ie they can stand alone as aesthetic works. All that being said, and no doubt the exhibit is worthwhile, what I do object to is the idiots who hold university tenure who teach young people that it is not only OK to write in the manner above but that it is somehow "superior" (in a snotty way) to normal grammatical English. Quite frankly you can do a machine translation from a foreign language and often get stuff that makes more sense than the above. I couldn't even begin to correct the grammar above. I have left everything as it was.
Does this seems trivial, nitpicking and school-marmish ? Does it interfere with the beautiful poetry of the free associations presented ? Maybe yes, but I would submit that you could express the metaphor of something like a "flowing stream" of anarchist propaganda without resorting to sophomoric distain for the English language and the plebs who speak it. I also say that the thought would be clearer and more beautiful without this little bit of inverse snobbery. Sloppy language, sloppy thought. Put your thoughts into real English, for instance, and you will realize just how silly the metaphor of a "body memory of the Movement" is, and why your thoughts should flow, in the proverbial stream, towards more productive metaphors.
I really and truly think that something has to be said about such a misuse of the language. Sad to say anarchists whose first language is not English and those who have never been indoctrinated in certain university departments usually express themselves much better than many of the supposedly "educated". Maybe it's that they really and truly want to make themselves understood rather than showing off their "rebelliousness".
Yes, this is mean spirited, and I have no doubt that the exhibit will be quite interesting. Still...it is several orders of magnitude less mean spirited than those who want to display signs of superiority via mangling the language. It also has the virtue of humility, which those who are carried away by their self-defined division from ordinary people cannot achieve. Incoherent thought is far too often the womb of delusions of grandeur.
