The art world is no longer defined by the activity of traditional art centers such as New York, Berlin, Beijing, or London, but is instead shaped by many cities, small and large. These new artistic communities, each reflecting the history, culture, and conditions of its region, have established a vibrant network for contemporary art. This groundbreaking book explores the hybrid nature of today’s international artistic landscape by introducing readers to the art scenes in six featured cities--Beirut, Lebanon; Cali, Colombia; Cluj, Romania; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; San Francisco, USA; and Tangier, Morocco. In bringing together work by artists whose efforts have anchored each city’s cultural scene, Six Lines of Flight maps the pathways between them, illuminating the dynamic, global, interconnected spirit of twenty-first-century art. Essays by writers active in each region are accompanied by color images of representative artworks, along with brief texts on key local artists and organizations. An introductory text by Apsara DiQuinzio and thematic essays by Hou Hanru, Pamela M. Lee, and Tarek Elhaik and Dominic Willsdon further contextualize cultural production in the featured cities in relation to common themes such as histories in construction, cosmopolitanism, center-periphery dynamics, collectivity, networks, and the effects of economic and cultural renaissance. Exhibition dates: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; September 15-December 31, 2012

This collection of quotes demonstrates the elegant simplicity of Ai Weiwei''s thoughts on key aspects of his art, politics, and life. A master at communicating powerful ideas in astonishingly few words, Ai Weiwei is known for his innovative use of social media to disseminate his views. The short quotations presented here have been carefully selected from articles, tweets, and interviews given by this acclaimed Chinese artist and activist. The book is organized into six categories: freedom of expression; art and activism; government, power, and moral choices; the digital world; history, the historical moment, and the future; and personal reflections. Together, these quotes span some of the most revealing moments of Ai Weiwei''s eventful career--from his risky investigation into student deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to his arbitrary arrest in 2011--providing a window into the mind of one of the world''s most electrifying and courageous contemporary artists. Select Quotes from the Book: ? On Freedom of Expression "Say what you need to say plainly, and then take responsibility for it." "A small act is worth a million thoughts." "Liberty is about our rights to question everything." On Art and Activism "Everything is art. Everything is politics." "The art always wins. Anything can happen to me, but the art will stay." "Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. I don''t feel that much anger. I equally have a lot of joy." On Government, Power, and Making Moral Choice? "Once you''ve tasted freedom, it stays in your heart and no one can take it. Then, you can be more powerful than a whole country." "I feel powerless all the time, but I regain my energy by making a very small difference that won''t cost me much." "Tips on surviving the regime: Respect yourself and speak for others. Do one small thing every day to prove the existence of justice." On the Digital Worl? "Only with the Internet can a peasant I have never met hear my voice and I can learn what''s on his mind. A fairy tale has come true." "The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It''s as simple as that." "The Internet is the best thing that could have happened to China." On History, the Historical Moment, and the Futur? "If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future." "We need to get out of the old language." "The world is a sphere, there is no East or West." Personal Reflection? "I''ve never planned any part of my career-- except being an artist. And I was pushed into that corner because I thought being an artist was the only way to have a little freedom." "Anyone fighting for freedom does not want to totally lose their freedom." "Expressing oneself is like a drug. I''m so addicted to it."

Routledge Companion to Museum Ethicsis a theoretically informed reconceptualization of museum ethics discourse as a dynamic social practice central to the project of creating change in the museum. Through twenty-seven chapters by an international and interdisciplinary group of academics and practitioners it explores contemporary museum ethics as an opportunity for growth, rather than a burden of compliance. The volume represents diverse strands in museum activity from exhibitions to marketing, as ethics is embedded in all areas of the museum sector. What the contributions share is an understanding of the contingent nature of museum ethics in the twenty-first century--its relations with complex economic, social, political and technological forces and its fluid ever-shifting sensibility. The volume examines contemporary museum ethics through the prism of those disciplines and methods that have shaped it most. It argues for a museum ethics discourse defined by social responsibility, radical transparency and shared guardianship of heritage. And it demonstrates the moral agency of museums: the concept that museum ethics is more than the personal and professional ethics of individuals and concerns the capacity of institutions to generate self-reflective and activist practice.

The past twenty years have seen a new generation of artists working together in small groups and large collectives to explore new avenues of art, design, performance, and communication. InCome Together, author and visual artist Francesco Spampinato assembles an international roster of forty of today's most exciting and influential collectives, from design studios like Project Projects and political performance artists The Yes Men to flash mob provocateurs Improv Everywhere and the multimedia artists Assume Vivid Astro Focus. Alongside visual portfolios of their best work are in-depth interviews addressing each group's unique motivations, processes, and objectives. What emerges is a shared desire to turn viewers into producers and to use commercial mass-media strategies to challenge prevailing social, political, and cultural power structures.Come Together is an essential resource and inspiration for students, art lovers, and anyone interested in the cutting edge of visual culture.

Powerful and often controversial, news pictures promise to make the world at once immediate and knowable. Yet while many great writers and thinkers have evaluated photographs of atrocity and crisis, few have sought to set these images in a broader context by defining the rich and diverse history of news pictures in their many forms. For the first time, this volume defines what counts as a news picture, how pictures are selected and distributed, where they are seen and how we critique and value them. Presenting the best new thinking on this fascinating topic, this book considers the news picture over time, from the dawn of the illustrated press in the nineteenth century, through photojournalism's heyday and the rise of broadcast news and newsreels in the twentieth century and into today's digital platforms. It examines the many kinds of images: sport, fashion, society, celebrity, war, catastrophe and exoticism; and many mediums, including photography, painting, wood engraving, film and video. Packed with the best research and full colour-illustrations throughout, this book will appeal to students and readers interested in how news and history are key sources of our rich visual culture.

"At the age of twenty-two I was sent to Saigon to cover the war as a photojournalist. I was too late for Indochina, and too early for Vietnam. Muggers robbed me on my arrival, and I lived in a small hotel by the river. I drove towards the front in an old Citroen. I think I was happy. I returned some years later. It was for another war, and the famous reporters had left. The streets were full of GIs and their girlfriends, of blind bomb victims and so many children returning to school. It was the end of an epoch, people would hand flowers to the soldiers. Everybody wanted to leave, and it was cheap to stay at luxury hotels. To forget my heartache, I got drunk and walked the streets all day. The city was very generous and welcomed me with open arms, so I lost sense of time. I stayed for months in this city that no longer exists. The last time I went there I was at peace with things, and at the War Remnants Museum I visited my friends who had died on the battlefield. Today, the city has another name and has become fully globalized."

Context Providers explores the ways in which digital art and culture are challenging and changing the creative process and our ways of constructing meaning. The authors introduce the concept of artists as context providers—people who establish networks of information in a highly collaborative creative process, blurring boundaries between disciplines. Technological change has affected the function of art, the role of the artist, and the way artistic productions are shared, creating a need for flexible information filters as a framework for establishing meaning and identity. Context Providers considers the work of media artists today who are directly engaging the scientific community through collaboration, active dialogue, and creative work that challenges the scientific.

For the first time since the end of the Second Indochina War, works on the war and its aftermath by both Vietnamese and American artists have been brought together in an exhibition that will travel in both countries. As Seen by Both Sides, which takes its name from the exhibition, is both a catalogue and explication of this deeply moving collection of art. Included are works by twenty Vietnamese and twenty American artists, most of whom are veterans of the war and all of whom testify to the irrevocable impact of that experience on their work. The images these men and women have created range from searing depictions of the realities of war to quiet sketches of those caught in its turmoil. The Vietnamese pieces have never been exhibited in the United States. Many were created in the field by soldiers who have used whatever materials were at hand and who carried their work around with them for years. This catalog may be the best record we will ever have of this exceptional collection. In addition to reproduction of the works -- 68 in color and 14 in black and white -- As Seen by Both Sides offers interpretive essays by American and Vietnamese scholars and critics, who explore the social, political, and aesthetic contexts of the work. This book also includes a photograph of and interview with each artist.

The Vietnam War (1964-1975) divided American society like no other war of the twentieth century, and some of the most memorable American art and art-related activism of the last fifty years protested U.S. involvement. At a time when Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art dominated the American art world, individual artists and art collectives played a significant role in antiwar protest and inspired subsequent generations of artists. This significant story of engagement, which has never been covered in a book-length survey before, is the subject of Kill for Peace. Writing for both general and academic audiences, Matthew Israel recounts the major moments in the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement and describes artists' individual and collective responses to them. He discusses major artists such as Leon Golub, Edward Kienholz, Martha Rosler, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, and Robert Morris; artists' groups including the Art Workers' Coalition (AWC) and the Artists Protest Committee (APC); and iconic works of collective protest art such as AWC's Q. And Babies? A. And Babies and APC's The Artists Tower of Protest. Israel also formulates a typology of antiwar engagement, identifying and naming artists' approaches to protest. These approaches range from extra-aesthetic actions--advertisements, strikes, walk-outs, and petitions without a visual aspect--to advance memorials, which were war memorials purposefully created before the war's end that criticized both the war and the form and content of traditional war memorials.

Demonstrates how activists and others use art and popular culture to strive for a more democratic future.

Judith Kapferer and her collaborators present an insightful volume that interrogates relations between the state and the arts in diverse national and cultural settings. The authors critique the taken-for-granted assumption about the place of the arts in liberal or social democratic states and the role of the arts in supporting or opposing the ideological work of government and non-government institutions. This innovative volume explores the challenges posed by the state to the arts and by the arts to the state, focusing on several transformations of the interrelations between state and commercial arts policies in the current era. These ongoing challenges include the control of repressive tolerance, complicity with and resistance to state power, and the commoditization of the arts, including their accommodation to market and state apparatuses. While endeavouring to avoid the currently dominant pragmatic and didactic priorities of officialdom, the contributors tackle social and cultural policy and practice in the arts as well as connections between national states and dissenting art from a range of genres.

The Routledge Companion to Art and Politicsoffers a thorough examination of the complex relationship between art and politics, and the many forms and approaches the engagement between them can take. The contributors - a diverse assembly of artists, activists, scholars from around the world - discuss and demonstrate ways of making art and politics legible and salient in the world. As such the 32 chapters in this volume reflect on performing and visual arts; music, film and new media; as well as covering social practice, community-based work, conceptual, interventionist and movement affiliated forms. The Companionis divided into four distinct parts: Conceptual Cartographies Institutional Materialities Modalities of Practice Making Publics Randy Martin has assembled a collection that ensures that readers will come away with a wider view of what can count as art and politics; where they might find it; and how it moves in the world. The diversity of perspectives is at once challenging and fortifying to those who might dismiss political art on the one hand as not making sufficient difference and on the other to those embracing it but seeking a means to elaborate the significance that it can make in the world. The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics brings together a range of issues and approaches and encourages critical and creative thinking about how art is produced, perceived, and received.

Author: Fiona Bradley, director of The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, emphasizes the importance of new work in the context developing art practices
Describes and documents the exhibition Cities on the Move, 1997 (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru) showing the progression of East Asian urbanism and the transformations that are taking place by categorizing them as “global cities”
Parallels TPG’s work that addresses globalisation, transportation and the impacts of culture commodification along with the differences and influences that interactions between distinct cultures

Why have so many artists turned to political subject matter in the last decade? Can art not only question but also reinvigorate the social, civic, and political imagination? Art and Politics Now offers a brilliant survey of artists engaged with "the political," whether in providing commentary, questioning social structures, or actively responding to the world around them. Eleven thematic chapters address and contextualize a range of highly topical subjects, including globalization, labor, technology, citizenship, war, activism, and information. Art and Politics Now also highlights the radical changes in the approaches and techniques used by artists to communicate their ideas, from the increase in collaborative, artist-led, and participatory projects to activism and intervention, documentary and archive work. Many high-profile artists are featured, including Chantal Ackerman, Ai Weiwei, Francis Alys, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Subodh Gupta, Teresa Margolles, Walid Raad, Raqs Media Collective, Doris Salcedo, BrunoSerralongue, and Santiago Sierra.

Mexico, with some 90 million people, holds a prominent place in Latin America. This book offers students and general readers a deeper understanding of Mexico's dynamism: its wealth of history, institutions, religion, cultural output, leisure, and social customs. Culture and Customs of Mexico allows the reader to engulf themselves in the funerary festivals of Mexico and make comparisons to Vietnam’s fantastical rituals, specifically to the Propeller Group’s The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music film. Authors and Latin American studies professors, Peter Standish and Steven M. Bell provide a cultural visualization of Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead or All Saints Day) through which one can base the comparison and similarities between the Mexican festivity and Vietnam’s fantastical funeral traditions and rituals.

Author: K.G. Izikowitz and P. Sørenson, Swedish anthropologists with focus on Indochina
Provides visual, socio-architectural and historical references to how the layered colonial background of Vietnam has affected the architectural style of residential and monumental houses - stresses the importance of open-air funerary complexes that parallel TPG’s Hue House exhibited at the Blaffer

Sources of Vietnamese Tradition provides an essential guide to two thousand years of Vietnamese history and a comprehensive overview of the society and state of Vietnam. Strategic selections illuminate key figures, issues, and events while building a thematic portrait of the country's developing territory, politics, culture, and relations with neighbors. The volume showcases Vietnam's remarkable independence in the face of Chinese and other external pressures and respects the complexity of the Vietnamese experience both past and present. The anthology begins with selections that cover more than a millennium of Chinese dominance over Vietnam (111 B.C.E.-939 C.E.) and follows with texts that illuminate four centuries of independence ensured by the Ly, Tran, and Ho dynasties (1009-1407). The earlier cultivation of Buddhism and Southeast Asian political practices by the monarchy gave way to two centuries of Confucian influence and bureaucratic governance (1407-1600), based on Chinese models, and three centuries of political competition between the north and the south, resolving in the latter's favor (1600-1885). Concluding with the colonial era and the modern age, the volume recounts the ravages of war and the creation of a united, independent Vietnam in 1975. Each chapter features readings that reveal the views, customs, outside influences on, and religious and philosophical beliefs of a rapidly changing people and culture. Descriptions of land, society, economy, and governance underscore the role of the past in the formation of contemporary Vietnam and its relationships with neighboring countries and the West.

In this ambitious and path-breaking book, Shawn McHale challenges long held views that define modern Vietnamese history in terms of anticolonial nationalism and revolution. McHale argues instead for a historiography that does not overstress either the role of politics in general or communism in particular. Using a wide range of sources from Vietnam, France, and the United States, many of them previously unexploited, he shows how the use of printed matter soared between 1920 and 1945 and in the process transformed Vietnamese public life and shaped the modern Vietnamese consciousnesss. Print and Power examines the impact of the French colonial state on Vietnamese society as well as Vietnamese and East Asian understandings of public discourse and public space. The work goes on to contest the impact of Confucianism on pre-modern and modern Vietnam and, based on materials never before used, provides a radically new perspective on the rise of Vietnamese communism from 1929 to 1945.