Photo of a Toynbee Tile by David A. Riggs, from Flickr.com.

Post by Erica Minutella, February 20, 2012

While running late for the DVD Release Party of Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles at the Trocadero Theatre on February 6, a friend casually remarked, “I don’t think we’ll have to worry. The line for the last screening wrapped around the corner. But who comes out on a Monday night to see an art documentary?”

A few hours and 500 people later, it became eminently clear that quite a lot of people do — at least, when said art documentary revolves around a mystery over thirty years in the making. For artist Justin Duerr, the tantalizing tiles he noticed embedded in street corners during treks throughout Philadelphia offered too great a call to ignore.

Known as the Toynbee Tiles, this street art of unknown origin has been spreading paranoiac messages about the media all along the east coast, and even as far as South America, since the early Eighties. As the Wikipedia page relates, the tiles carry variations on the following message:

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN Kubrick’s 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER

Richard Dreyfuss might be apt to jump to extraterrestrial conclusions when encountering repetitive, inexplicable messages, but Justin and the team of Toynbee enthusiasts he encounters in Resurrect Dead remain just as assiduous in their search for a strictly human explanation. Director Jon Foy’s Philadelphia-based documentary will take you on a journey over familiar streets, as clues and red herrings battle with each other and with the audience’s curiosity. While this Philadelphia hunt doesn’t involve Nicholas Cage and the Declaration of Independence, local viewers may find this mystery even more exciting, if only because the very real solution lies surprisingly close to home.

Find future screenings here, or relive the mystery again and again on DVD. Find the upcoming schedule for Movie Mondays at the Troc here.

Tags: arthur toynbee, jon foy, justin duerr, resurrect dead, stanley kubrick, toynbee, toynbee tiles, trocadero theatre
Posted in Front Page, Philly Art News, Reviews | No Comments »

Sharon Hayes, "I March In The Parade Of Liberty, But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free," 2008

Post by Kira Grennan, February 13, 2012

FIVE ACTS: CHRONICLES OF DISSENT, at Marginal Utility through March 18, brings together five artists who work with the subject of contemporary political protest, investigating how different marginalized voices of opposition speak and are being heard.

Some of the pieces in the exhibition–those by Sharon Hayes and Mark Tribe–restage historical episodes, revealing new meanings for a contemporary audience.  Tribe’s Port Huron project reenacts protest speeches from the 1960s and 70s, critically examining the change in public response to markedly similar political situations.  Hayes’ piece, “I March In The Parade of Liberty But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free,” records the artist giving a public speech to an anonymous lover in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, drawing from early gay Liberation parade slogans, among other sources.  Her work interrogates the relationship between public and private speech, exposing the emotional underpinning of collective political action.

Other pieces in the show–those by Yael Bartana, Andrea Bowers, and Naeem Mohaiemen–document specific recent events or issues, providing a platform for discussion and exposure in the space of the gallery.  Bartana’s “Wild Seeds” shows a game staged by the artist in a stunning mountainous landscape in the West Bank, where a group of teenagers, bodies entangled, simulates an actual confrontation between Jewish settlers and the Israeli army.  The voices and movements of the teens teeter between playfulness and aggression, and the viewer is lodged in an intentionally uncomfortable state of ambiguity.  In Andrea Bowers’ “Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training—Tree Sitting Forest Defense,” the artist is trained to sit for a prolonged period of time in the branches of an enormous tree as an act of nonviolent protest. This piece, with its do-it-yourself position, bridges theory and practice, urging visitors to follow up words and ideas with concrete action. Finally, Naeem Mohaiemen’s pairing of photographs and text, “Live True or Die Trying,” records the narrative of two rallies in Dhaka, Bangladesh on the same day—one organized by young Islamists and the other by a group of university Leftists, while his video Nayak (lost hero of history) pieces together a protest from mobile phone clips.  The artist’s construction of these narratives conveys his own responses and biases, betraying the uneven, personal nature of documentary.

Plurality of medium is a crucial part of the exhibition; text pieces stand alongside videos, spoken words, and still images.  This rich variety, native to the practices of the five artists in the show, mirrors the diverse means protesters have found to articulate their concerns in the current global economic and political climate.   Several of the artists live and work in multiple cities, a fact that indicates the complex collective voice the exhibition presents. In her statement, curator Yaelle Amir describes the way oppositional movements vary according to each particular language, tactics, location, and movement size.  The exhibition feels in some ways like a cross-section of the specific energy and texture of these different oppositional voices, allowing visitors to enter the verb ‘to protest.’  Looking at the pieces, we become conscious not only of the issues around which the protesters converge but also of the wide range of options available to make our voices heard.

Personally, I found the exhibition to be an invocation to pay attention to and engage with these different options, first within the space of the gallery, and then continuing on into my everyday life.  The pieces in FIVE ACTS: CHRONICLES OF DISSENT speak clearly about the potential energy of art as activism, taking the position that the two are never really separable.  Every expression, just as much as it is personally motivated and felt, is immediately engaged and implicated in a larger, political conversation.

Tags: andrea bowers, five acts chronicles of dissent, mark tribe, naeem mohaiemen, sharon hayes, yael bartana, yaelle amir
Posted in Front Page, Reviews | No Comments »

Two InLiquid members have received a suspicious looking email from the following email address: gaythanluozo@gmail.com.

Update 2-20-2012: As of the last post, nine more members have reported receiving an email from this address. A few have received the following response to their queries:

“Thanks for the message, I am very happy to know that the item is
available for sale. i must tell you that my wife  browse through the
net and saw your item artwork (Sarah’s Baby II, and The Monster Who
Grew Small, with J. Vollmer) now, and we are  very much interested in
the immediate purchase because we need it for our new apartment,we
will like to  buy it before someone else requested for it, and we will
be paying you securely with a Bank cheque  which will be payable to
your name and we will wait till it clears your bank before the pick
up,You don’t have to worry about shipment, my shipper will handle it.
This is because i will be traveling out of the country any moment from
now on a business proposal.i want you to get back to me with the information needed to send you
the payment so that the payment can be mailed out to you soonI:EFull Name
Standard Address
CELL NUMBER
Total costkindly get back to me So that i can proceed with the payment
arrangement and relay it to you, consider it sold and get back to me
with the details of yours in which the cheque will be written,i await
your message…thanks & regards”

 

Read more on how to avoid Buyer/Shipping Scams similar to the one above by clicking here.

Do you know of a scam you’d like to report? Send it to erica@inliquid.org and we’ll be happy to post it to the blog under the new Art Scams section, which you can find by clicking on “Categories” at the left-hand side of the screen.

Find more helpful tips for avoiding scams:
artscams.com

If you’ve already been the victim of a scam, find a roundup of steps you can take here.

 The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3):
www.ic3.gov

Tags: art scam, art scam email, buyer/shipping scam, gaythan luozo, gaythanluozo@gmail.com
Posted in Art Scams | No Comments »