The comic “La Trompestad” by Michelle Sayles is the perfect illustration of what it feels like to live in the first week of Donald Trump's America. Although we may feel defeated, we must remain vigorous in our fight against Trump and his administrations' spectacle of “alternative facts”. Michelle Sayles is an artist and community organizer living in Burlington, Vermont. You can find more of her work on her blog. – Craig E. Ross
Read MoreFuck 2016, Support Red Wedge
Trump effigy sent on fire during a Guy Fawkes celebration in the UK
Count us among those who wish to drive a stake into the heart of 2016. This was a year in which the world definitively became a darker, more impoverished place. We lost battles and we lost friends. Trump won. Aleppo fell. The Ghost Ship burned and looks to have opened a rash of low-level war against DIY art venues. Some great artists left us and some important comrades. There were victories, and important ones at that (Standing Rock, the defeat of a few authoritarians at the polls in Europe), but too few
Read MoreThe Return of the Crowd (Call for Submissions)
From top left: A pro-Trump crowd (2016), Georgia during the 1917 Revolution, anti-austerity protest in Athens (2015), Black Lives Matter (2015), the Spanish Civil War (1936), the Chicago protest that shut down a Trump rally (2016), Occupy Wall Street (2011), Popular Front protest in Paris (1936), Fascists in Greece (2014).
We are looking for essays, papers, reviews, short stories, poetry, visual art, comics, and other submissions that deal with some of these questions. What does the return of crowds mean for an insular art world and its weak avant-garde? What are the aesthetics of anti-capitalist totalities? What are the aesthetics of today’s neo-fascists? What is the difference between socialist and fascist aesthetic leveling? What lessons for contemporary art and culture can we take from the Russian Revolution – and its artists and writers? What about lessons from other key revolutions – the Mexican Revolution for example? What about the aesthetics of anti-fascist struggles – in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, in occupied France? What are the aesthetic relationships between class and other identities in trying to build militant anti-fascist resistance as well as counter-narrative to neoliberal capitalism? What do the crowds of art history and past literatures – Zola, Courbet, Brecht – have to tell us about making socialist art today?
Read Moreintroducing wedgeshop
Fluxus mail-order warehouse/fluxshop (1964-65) and wedgeshop website (2016)
Red Wedge Magazine is pleased to announce our new project wedgeshop; aiming to distribute socialist and popular avant-garde art, media and cultural artifacts (at affordable rates that compensate artists). At wedgeshop you will be able to order copies of Red Wedge, subscribe to our print journal, order special chapbooks, pamphlets, posters, digital materials, t-shirts, and more. We are also building up a platform for our co-thinkers and other left-wing artists to distribute artwork. It has become clear that the institutions of the art world and the culture industry will not sufficiently support a popular avant-garde. It is up to us.
Read MoreVictory to Striking Cinema Workers
Recently, one of Red Wedge's editors had the chance while in London to stop by the picket line at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. It was perhaps one of the more spirited and creative picket lines that he's attended in quite some time, particularly considering the bitter cold and the utter intransigence of management.
The Ritzy is part of the Picturehouse chain of cinemas in Britain, which presents itself as somewhat art-house but unpretentious (the Ritzy, for example, is currently showing Jim Jarmusch's latest film Paterson as well as Office Christmas Party).
Read More
Dollar Art House Sells Out
These are hard times. These were hard times before the ascendancy of Donald Trump; before the fascist human dust of the United States became emboldened; before the incoming administration started planning a series of social policy arsons. Times are even harder now. To pay for these hard times the Dollar Art House is selling out; or rather we are selling artwork and putting on some first rate poetry and musical performances. From 5pm to 11pm on Friday, December 9, the “Dollar Art House Sells Out” will feature music and performances by Poet X, IndyBlack, Sunni Hutton and Jesa D’Or, along with artwork by Craig E. Ross and Adam Turl.
Read MoreThe Resistible Rise of Donald Trump: Two Performances
Poor Mike Pence. Greeted with a friendly gaggle of actors who both recognize him and are willing to express well-meaning concern over the havoc he may wreak as vice president. Pity too Donald Trump, who now feels blindsided by the realization that the theater isn't somewhere he and his cohort can retreat from the consequences of their actions.
Trump's reaction is what ultimately makes the action of the Hamilton cast a Good Thing. The man spent fifteen months using his own bully pulpit in a far less kindly way.
Read MoreDylan as Poet
Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His name had been occasionally mentioned as a possible nominee in the past decade or so, but he was seen as unlikely to win for two reasons. The obvious one is that as a singer-songwriter rather than a published novelist, playwright or poet, his work has stood outside mainstream notions of what constitutes “literature” for most of Western establishment opinion, although the Nobel did, long ago, honor Winston Churchill for his works of history.
The second reason this was unlikely is that Dylan is American, and therefore, as we know from a gaffe years ago from a ranking member of the Swedish Academy, a provincial...
Read MoreThe Flood
Hard Times at The Dollar Art House
We are pleased to announce the launch of the Dollar Art House and its first exhibition, “The Hard Times Art Show.” The Dollar Art House is a DIY project, based in St. Louis, Missouri, of Red Wedge editors and artists Craig E. Ross and Adam Turl. Dollar Art House aims to provide a platform for a popular avant-garde; experimental art that is connected to popular concerns and audiences.
Read MoreDancing On Phyllis Schlafly's Grave
There is a special place in Hell reserved for Phyllis Schlafly. It is by no means the hottest or most painful sectors reserved for the Hitlers or Pol Pots. But it is a dismal one.
It is likely a gray, colorless room with no doors or windows. Before her are three buttons that provide a break from the endless, blood-curdling screams piped in from outside. Each button will briefly play a short slice of soulless elevator music chosen by the Satan's hand-picked focus group.
Read MoreLucy Parsons at the Golden Nugget
Alex Pullman claimed to have been abducted by aliens. While aboard their spacecraft he had the following visions of the future. The bombs and missiles of World War Three were frozen above the world's cities just as the UFOs arrived. Later that day long-dead communards reappeared as zombies and ghosts – walking anachronisms in the streets of each city and town. The "Evicted Art Blog" will, over the coming months, share Pullman's account of his visions.
Read MoreEvicted Art (8 Points)
As Ernst Fischer observed in The Necessity of Art, the origin of art in hunter-gatherer societies resulted in the projection of the human imagination on all that which could not yet be understood. Fischer argued that this was both a social and spiritual aspect of early art. Humans, he argued, rebelled against consuming themselves in the confines of their own life. At the same time art served to unite small bands of human beings around common concerns and a common narrative.
Read MoreWhy Don’t We Make Love Anymore?
Annihilate, the new comic by Brandon Daniels and Sam Boven (Hive Mind Comics), begins with what appears to be some kind of microscopic cell, bacteria or virus. It divides. It then relinks as it grows. It is part of a subterranean network, a complex ecology. Evolutionary biology runs its course. It produces larvae and insects. “The grotesque concept of the body is not a closed completed unit."
Read MoreQuantité Negligeable
The playwright Bertolt Brecht, in his polemics with the theorist George Lukács argued: "Even those writers who are conscious of the fact that capitalism impoverishes, dehumanizes, mechanizes human beings, and who fight against it, seem to be part of the same process of impoverishment: for they too, in their writing, appear to be less concerned with elevating man, they rush him through events, treat his inner life as quantité negligeable..."
Read MoreRed Wedge No. 2 Launch (Chicago + St. Louis)
Red Wedge is proud and humbled to be the only English language publication examining all the arts from a Marxist viewpoint. Our second issue, “Art Against Global Apartheid”, dropped in May, and we want you to come celebrate it with us. We will have copies of RW2 available for purchase, as well as other cool items (posters, pamphlets, etc). If you're new to the publication, a long time reader who wants to show support, or just want to come talk art and radical politics, we expect to see you there.
Read MoreThe Realms of the Unreal
The model of “self-taught genius” ignores the social genius of Darger’s Child Slave Rebellion. After all, Darger’s work was shaped by the very real instructors of his life; his kind father, his brutal treatment as a ward of the state of Illinois, the “dead-end” proletarian job that awaited him in adulthood. It is no accident that Darger’s epic illuminated manuscript is, at its core, about a rebellion of child-slaves. Nor are his transgender heroes necessarily a mere accident of individual genius or naïveté. Maybe they are glimpses of the future emancipation that could not yet be articulated.
Read MoreSupport Consumer Grade Film
Still from Consumer Grade Film's In Circles demo reel.
Consumer Grade Film is producing a feature-length movie, In Circles, and they need your help. As they write on their website:
Consumer Grade Film is a U.S. Midwestern collective of filmmakers focusing on low-budget, socially-conscious projects. Our current works in progress include the short, Ubercreep, the feature length film, In Circles, and the YouTube channel, VHS Girl. We are open to collaboration with other filmmakers focusing on similar content.
Read MoreWriggling Off the Precipice
The experimental hip-hop group clipping. have a new E.P. out. It’s called Wriggle. The group’s M.C. Daveed Diggs has recently become nothing short of a Broadway celebrity lately since winning a Tony for his role in Hamilton. The man is a phenom, an insane talent on the microphone. There’s no question about this. Diggs’ more usual fare with clipping. is, however, of a somewhat different fare. As I’ve put it previously, he’s far more Marquis de Sade than Lafayette, and clipping. fit right in with the insurgence of “industrial hip-hop” we’ve seen over the past few years that also includes the likes of Death Grips. Here’s the title track and lead single from the new E.P.
Read MoreA World In Flames: Orlando
The painting is of Jesus Christ on the cross. It’s very apparent, but also quite jarring in its differences from the iconography of European Christianity in the 20th century. Marc Chagall, the Jewish painter, deliberately estranged and defamiliarized the painting’s subject. The cross on which he is crucified does not have a top and is shaped more like a “T” (as some scholars say many crucifixes were). Christ himself is wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl. This is not Jesus as Christian messiah we are seeing suffer, but Jesus as Jew.
White Crucifixion was painted by Chagall in 1938. Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that was officially sanctioned by Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels, had taken place just prior to his starting the painting. It was a plea for the world to acknowledge and pay attention to what was being done to Europe’s Jews at the time.
Read More