Michael Szpakowski
Since the beginning
Works in Harlow United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

epic net art


Hi Manik
well, as people as smart as you should know, one defining feature of racism is imputing negative characteristics to an entire race solely on the basis of that race. Hence:

<High natality is and it always was Shiptars national and state project>

It's a classic racist trope.

So, I have no problem with
"Some Albanians ( for material and explicable reasons) are drug dealers"
in the same way as I would have no problem with
"Some Serbs are war criminals" or "Some US presidents/former UK Prime ministers are war criminals" or indeed , "some ethnic Albanians are war criminals".

Your polemical posts are Janus faced.
Your critique of capital and imperialism and the drive to war looks towards the future; the nationalist and -yes- racist elements look towards the past.

" In acquiring one’s conception of the world one always belongs to a particular grouping which is that of all the social elements which share the same mode of thinking and acting. We are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass or collective man. The question is this: of what historical type is the conformism, the mass humanity to which one belongs? When one’s conception of the world is not critical and coherent but disjointed and episodic, one belongs simultaneously to a multiplicity of mass human groups. The personality is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over."
Antonio Gramsci, Prison notebooks.

Which will it be? - backward and historically outmoded nationalism, or a vision of a future where the Serb and Albanian masses (not easily won, of course; nothing worth fighting for usually is) stand together, in defence of their common interests, against capital and imperialism...

michael


DISCUSSION

epic net art


Hi Manik
as you know I'm an admirer of your work in general and also I'd agree with a good deal of the content of your post, which also has the great merit of taking the discussion beyond a tiny, over excited & over heated fragment of the New York art world.
But then you go and fuck it up by your resort once again to crude anti Albanian stereotypes and to racist language which disfigures & corrupts both your political & artistic points.
A shame.
best wishes
michael

DISCUSSION

Some things I made in May


Hi
here're some things I made in May.

http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/vlog/ScenesOfProvincialLife.cgi/2008/05

There're quite a few but if you only watch one
can I suggest that, despite its size of 62MB or so,
you check out the piece entitled '6th May 2008'
( which, perhaps confusingly, was posted on May 9th) -
I'm particularly fond of it :)
Though, *do* look at the others too!
I've got nothing clever to say about any of them nor do I think
they are unified by anything except,
unfashionable notion, my particular *sensibility*.
See what you think...
thanks
michael

DISCUSSION

Summer Reading Suggestions


Frank Sibley "Aesthetic Concepts" ( collected in a number of places including Sibley's Collected Papers : 'Approaches to Aesthetics' OUP New York 2001)

Meyer Schapiro: 'Einstein & Cubism, Science and Art" ( in Schapiro -'The Unity of Picasso's Art' George Braziller New York 2000)

I'm not being perverse or obscure. I challenge anyone to read these marvelous pieces and not gain something from their clarity of thought and expression, even if one completely disagrees with them.