A Poor Wayfaring Stranger

"There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life."*

*-Federico Fellini

ARTIFACTS

Bob Mizer: ARTIFACTS

Invisible Exports, 14A Orchard Street, NYC

December 14 - January 27

Opening Reception: Friday, December 14, 6-8PM

Curated by Billy Miller, in conjunction with the Bob Mizer Foundation

http://www.invisible-exports.com/exhibitions/46_mizer/mizer_artifacts_images.html

Bringing Home the Bacon

"Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.
"Neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much wanted for the understanding as for the hand. And as the instruments of the hand either give motion or guide it, so the instruments of the mind supply either suggestions for the understanding of cautions.
"Human knowledge and human power meet in one, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed...
"It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old.
"We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve forever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress."
-Francis Bacon

INFO:
http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/june2006/francis_bacon.html

“Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others.”*

"The masses can no longer find a way to go on living; they see that they possess nothing and that they suffer under the harsh and flinty oppression of the ruling class. The hour strikes for great and memorable revolutionary events, already foreseen in the writings of the of the times, when a general overthrow of the system of private property is inevitable, when the revolt of the poor against the rich becomes a necessity that can no longer be postponed."

*-François-Noël Babeuf

INFO:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/François-Noël_Babeuf

Robert Owen*

*- (A Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement.)

"Millennium" I know not what ideas individuals may attach to the term; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.”

- Extract from "Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark" New Year’s Day, 1816

(pictured above: A bird's eye view of a community in New Harmony, Indiana, as proposed by Robert Owen. Engraving by F. Bate, London 1838.)

INFO:
http://www.robert-owen.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Harmony,_Indiana

Sight Unseen: high/low

An evening of short films & special surprises!

Saturday, August 4th, 8:00 pm
Artists Television Access
992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA

Warhol Superstars • Marijuana • Modernist Homes • Roller Coasters • Clones • Scary Children • Rust Belt Survivors • Politically-Incorrect Cartoons • Architectural Containment • & MORE!

Featuring short films by:
Scott Newman, Marc Santo, Brenda Ann Kenneally, Niklas Goldbach, Stephen Mallon, Peter Schneider, Darrin Martin, Sienna D'Enema

PLUS complimentary copies of REVEL NY, & special surprises

Programed by: Billy Miller
http://billy-miller-stuff.blogspot.com/

INFO:
http://www.atasite.org/2012/08/sight-unseen-highlow/

Re: Pre-Columbian Native American Societies

"No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits - and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves: only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened - and our capital punishment is nothing by blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than today - the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the households - yet there is not need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy - the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. all are equal and free - the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes.

And what men and women such a society breeds is proved by the admiration inspired in all white people who have come into contact with unspoiled Indians, by the personal dignity, uprightness, strength of character, and courage of these barbarians.
This is what men and society were before the division into classes. And when we compare their position with that of the overwhelming majority of civilized men today, and enormous gulf separates the present-day proletarian and peasant from the free member of the old gentile society.
But we must not forget that this organization was doomed. It did not go beyond the tribe. The confederacy of tribes already marks the beginning of its collapse. Outside the tribe was outside the law. Wherever there was not an explicit treaty of peace, tribe was at war with tribe, and wars were waged with the cruelty which distinguishes man from other animals, and which was only mitigated later by self-interest. This constitution presupposed an extremely undeveloped state of production and therefore and extremely sparse population over a wide area. Man's attitude to nature was therefore one of almost complete subjection to a strange incomprehensible power. Man was bounded by his tribe, both in relation to strangers from the outside the tribe and to himself. Thus, the power of the primitive society had to be broken and broken it was. But broken by influences which from the very start appear as a degradation, a fall from the simple moral greatness of the old gentile society. The lowest interests - base greed, brutal appetites, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of the common wealth - inaugurate the new, civilized, class society. It is by the vilest means - theft, violence, fraud, treason - that the old classless gentile society is underminded and overthrown. And the new society itself, during all the two and a half thousand years of its existence, has never been anything else b the development of the small minority at the expense of the exploited and oppressed majority; today it is so more than ever before."

- Frederick Engels
(excerpted from: The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State)

Up Against It

Munch Gallery NYC

July 21 - August 11, 2012
Opening: July 21, 6 - 8 pm

Featuring:
D-L Alvarez, Anonymous, Jonathan Berger, Michael Bilsborough, Matt Borruso, Kathe Burkhart, Luke Butler, Brendan Carroll, Mavado Charon, Sam Dargan, Pia Dehne, Daniel Derwelis, Eric Doeringer, Peter Eide, Carl Ferrero, Gregory Green, Teenie Harris, Cliff Hengst, Christian Holstad, Scott Hug, Dennis Kane, Brenda Ann Kenneally, David King, Lisa Kirk, Noah Lyon, Michael Magnan, Yeni Mao, Darrin Martin, Rachel Mason, Jan-Holger Mauss, Salvor (Ross Menuez), John Monteith, Glynnis McDaris, Mary Nicholson, Mark Ohe, Gwenaël Rattke, Nick Rule, Mark Shetabi, Tara Sinn, Superm (Brian Kenny + Slava Mogutin), Paul Taylor, Margaret Tedesco, Scott Treleaven, Jan Wandrag

Curated by Billy Miller

INFO:
http://www.munchgallery.com/up_against_it

(above: sculpture by Peter Eide)

Beatitdude

"I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you'll finally get it."

"What difference does it make after all? Anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? What's earth? All in the mind."

-Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

INFO:
http://www.beatmuseum.org/kerouac/jackkerouac.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac