STACEY DUCHARME

How do we plan for the future

or raise children
knowing what we know?
Ansel AdAms, “CleAring Winter storm.” Yosemite VAlleY, 1937.

What is global warming anyway?

tiinA itkonen, “sermermiut 1, ilulissAt, greenlAnd”
WWW.tiinAitkonen.Com / instAgrAm: tiinAitkonen

The correct answer is that it is mass extinction.

— Timothy Morton
ArAquém AlCântArA
photogrApher unknoWn
photogrApher unknoWn
JeAn-FrAnçois millet
Onur Aşkın
steVe ditko
AndY rementer
mArissA
dAVid shrigleY
 we’re

STUCK

ın May, Jeff koons’ steel "rabbit," created in 1986, became

the most expensive artwork ever to be sold at auction. ıts
final sale price was in excess of $91 million.

in a period of aesthetic
and moral stagnation
©lAuren greenField/institute. From her proJeCt “generAtion WeAlth” on displAY At the louisiAnA museum oF modern Art in denmArk
 . . . OUT OF
EXISTENTIAL DESPAIR

OUT OF HOPE

OUT OF THE CLAMOR

A BRUTALIST NEW
AESTHETIC EMERGES
 briAn
ArnAldo Coen And mYrA lAndAu. published in sAlón independiente 70, 1970. Fondo
nissen/sAlón independiente, Centro de doCumentACión ArkheiA, muAC, unAm.
 ... slowly,
ever so slowly,
we’re stumbling into a
deeper, more intense
kind of
sensuality
robert mApplethorpe
Artist unknoWn
Alex dA COrte, “ACtıvıty #9”, 2006. ArChıvAl pıgMent prınt
 YVes klein

ın the late 1950s, French artist yves klein was the first to have mixed the
deep hue of blue — known as ınternational klein Blue (ıkB) — shown
above in one of his many monochrome works. Such a painting was, for
yves, an “open window to freedom,” a portal to infinity — an invitation to
become immersed in pure, boundless depths of colour.
tAkAshi murAkAmi
 reVerend hoWArd Finster

howard Finster was an American outsider artist and

Baptist minister. Besides his paintings, Finster is most
known for the paradise garden, an elaborately deco-
rated plot of land in rural georgia meant, in Finster’s
words, to be “kinda like the garden of eden.”
 Play
what’s
not
there! is
s D a v
— Mile
Artist unknoWn
 When I saw it, my heart fell. A good Tea-
bowl, yes, but how ordinary! So simple, no
more ordinary thing could be imagined.
There is no trace of ornament, not a trace of
calculation. It is just a Korean food bowl, a
bowl, moreover, that a poor man would use
every day – commonest crockery.
The clay had been dug from the hill at the back of the house; the
glaze was made from the ash from the hearth; the potter’s wheel
had been irregular. The shape revealed no particular thought; it
was one of many. The work had been fast; the turning was rough;
done with dirty hands; the throwing slipshod; the glaze had run
over the foot. The throwing room had been dark. The kiln was a
wretched affair; the firing careless. Sand had stuck to the pot, but
nobody minded; no one invested the thing with any dreams.
More than anything else, this pot is healthy. Made for a purpose,
made to work. Sold to be used in everyday life. If it were fragile, it
would not serve its purpose.
THE UNKNOWN CRAFTSMAN –
A JAPANESE INSIGHT INTO BEAUTY
by Soetsu Yanagi
Kodansha 1972
will Islamic modesty
be the new
cool?
hAsAn torAbi
CArlYle bAker
hollY FrAnCis
FrAnz kline
 As the earth
spins madly
out of control
and the horizon of our future darkens,
there is somewhere in North America,
Europe, Japan, in Africa, Latin America,
the Arab world, a young mind at work,
a young artist conjuring up a vision,
a young ember catching flame, the
beacon to light our way forward.

In the next few issues of Adbusters, we

scour the earth, the cities and wilds, for
that creative visionary.

— Eds
photogrApher unknoWn
pleAse ContACt us
EDS
EdItor IN cHIEf Kalle Lasn
sENIor EdItor John Bucher
Writer/eDitor Trevor Clarke
coNtrIbutINg EdItors
Deborah Campbell
Clive Hamilton
James MacKinnon
Andy Merrifield the mark of
Joseph Moore
Lela Vujnić
the new world to come
 A Republican soldier
falls at the hands of
fascists during the
Spanish Civil War in
combat photographer
Robert Capa’s
“Loyalist Militiaman
at the Moment of
Death, Cerro Muriano,
September 5, 1936.”

Armed with the

Maxim gun — the
first fully automated
machine gun —
the British Empire
(and other colonial
powers) conquered
nations and
subjugated peoples
the world over.
A Japanese soldier clutches the severed
head of a Chinese civilian. From December
1937 to January 1938, China’s then-capital,
Nanjing, saw the Imperial Japanese Army
rape and murder tens (by some estimates,
hundreds) of thousands.
 Ten million soldiers died and twenty million were
wounded in the four years of “the war to end all wars.”
Those numbers don’t include the civilians who died, the
children caught in cross fires. At the Battle of Verdun
alone, a “battle” that went on for six months, 350,000
Frenchmen and 330,000 Germans died. That’s 3,778
people killed every day — one World Trade Center a day,
for six months.
Imagine coming back to your nice Victorian home
after that. Imagine having just lived through four years
of watching your friends die hanging in the tangled
barbed wire of no-man’s-land. Imagine yourself,
hunkered down in your trench, listening to them scream
all night until the screaming stopped. Imagine coming
back home after that, putting on a dinner jacket for
Mama’s evening musical, and listening to a matronly
soprano singing “The Last Rose of Summer.” How were
you supposed to sit on your little gold ballroom chair,
wearing your dinner jacket and sipping your digestif,
after what you had been through, pretending nothing
had changed?

— Natalia Ilyin, Chasing the Perfect

German citizens were forced by the
victors to go into the camps and look
 Over seven weeks in 2014, more than 550
Palestinian children died in Gaza during the
conflict known as Operation Protective Edge.

No poetry
After Gaza

— Adorno
Every woman adores a fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
— Silvia Plath
To designate a hell is not, of course,
to tell us anything about how to
extract people from that hell, how
to moderate hell’s flames.
Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge,
to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much
suffering caused by human wickedness there
is in the world we share with others. Someone
who is perennially surprised that depravity
exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even
incredulous) when confronted with evidence
of what humans are capable of inflicting in
the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties
upon other humans, has not reached moral or
psychological adulthood.
No one after a certain age has the right to
this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this
degree of ignorance, or amnesia.
There now exists a vast repository of images
that make it harder to maintain this kind of
moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images
haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and
cannot possibly encompass most of the reality
to which they refer, they still perform a vital
function. The images say: This is what human
beings are capable of doing -- may volunteer
to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously.
Don’t forget.
-- Susan Sontag
FrAnCisCo goYA
susAn sontAg / photo bY Annie leiboVitz
FrAnCisCo goYA
miroslAV tiChý, CourtesY tiChY oCeAn
 no selfies
after WW3...

The world is bright. The sun shines, tempting you

to idle by a sleepy Moravian town’s only swimming
pool. The day’s balmy embrace leaves your skin
aglow, as if with its own modest radiance. As you
approach the poolside, a tepid breeze half-heartedly
churns the dust on the road and stirs the leaves
on the trees into a chorus of hushed murmurs.
The sunlight breaks gently through the branches,
casting a mottled patchwork of glimmering shade
onto the encircling lawn. The crowd at the water’s
edge moves about indifferently, languid and lazy as
the day. It is as if nature has conspired to render the
world benign and comfortable for your benefit.
As you begin to undress, revealing the swimsuit
beneath your summer frock, a vague shadow
appears beyond the chain-link fence. Its darkness
is striking amid the bright of day. As it emerges
from between the tree-trunks, its shape becomes
discernible: it is a man’s, squalidly attired, with a
disheveled beard and matted hair. In his filthy hands,
he holds a crude object assembled from shards and
lumps of discarded material. A cylinder, perhaps a
cardboard tube, projects outwards from the thing;
he holds it up to his eye like a makeshift camera.
Wordlessly, as if unnoticed, he apes taking your
picture, and smiles a vagabond’s grin.
 The town is Kyjov, in the southeast of the Czech
Republic; the man is Miroslav Tichý; and the camera,
in fact, is real. During some twenty years, from the
1960s until the 1980s, Tichý took tens if not hundreds
of thousands of ghostly photographs, mostly of
unsuspecting women, with primitive cameras that he
made from whatever he had at hand. For lenses, he used
Plexiglas, ground and polished with toothpaste and
cigarette ash; for shutter mechanisms, spools of wood
and ribbons fashioned from the elastic waistbands of
threadbare underwear; for rewind knobs, caps from
beer bottles; for mounts, wood or cardboard.
The resulting images are, in the words of Tichý’s
onetime neighbour, Roman Buxbaum, “underexposed
or overexposed, out of focus, made from scratched
negatives, developed on paper that is either cut by
hand or even torn.” They feature women (or their
disembodied, eroticized parts) of all ages, in haphazard
scenes of everyday life, in the streets and parks of
Kyjov. A few of the subjects, flattered, smile or pose
spontaneously; others scowl into the lens. Most seem
to be caught unawares, the captor of their images
peering at them surreptitiously, at a distance. Tichý’s
brutal post-production treatment of his photographs —
which, according to Buxbaum, included “dust and dirt
on everything, filth in the camera and in the darkroom,
finger prints [sic], bromide stains, places gnawed by
rats and silverfish” — only adds to their haunting,
forlorn, and foreboding character.
“When I was a little boy,” recounts Buxbaum, “my
grandmother used to say: ‘Wash your hands! Otherwise
you’ll be like Mirek Tichý!’ For my grandmother, Tichý
was a prime example of what not to be.” In 2005,
Kyjov’s then-mayor, while admiring some of Tichý’s
photographs in Zürich, explained that he had known
of Tichý since his childhood (“since I went to the
swimming pool,” where Tichý was forbidden to enter),
when fellow children thought of Tichý as a frightening,
spectral presence. Believing his cameras to be false,
they bought into the local folklore, which described
Tichý as a sort of madman. “Now” that the mayor
could appreciate his work, “I would like to take my
hat off to him.”
Notoriety came late to Tichý. The accumulating
results of his prodigious, years-long project were
discovered only in 1981, when Buxbaum (who has made
a short documentary, Tarzan Retired, about Tichý), was
permitted, after more than a decade of exile, to return to
Kyjov from Switzerland. (Buxbaum’s family had escaped
Czechoslovakia during the Soviet invasion in 1968.) And
it was not until 2004 that Tichý’s photographs were
exhibited for the first time, at the International Biennial
of Contemporary Art of Seville. Larger, solo exhibitions
— such as those in Zürich, Paris, and New York (in 2005,
2008, and 2010 respectively) — helped to garner ever
wider appreciation for his work.
By then, Tichý had long ceased to take photographs:
“I had a planned number I wanted to do: I would make
such and such a number a day, such and such a number
in five years, and when I did it, I quit,” sometime in the
mid-1980s. But even longer before, he had renounced
another artistic calling. In 1945, Tichý attended the
Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he painted in
the modernist style of the prewar era. But after the
Communist coup in 1948, Tichý’s freedom to paint
was severely restricted. He refused to depict the
narrow, political subjects that the Communists censors
demanded, and dropped out of the Academy.

miroslAV tiChý, CourtesY tiChY oCeAn
Then began a period of crisis,
disillusionment, and passive resistance.
Strangeness and nonconformity made
him a suspicious figure in the eyes of the
authorities. “He was the opposite,” in
Buxbaum’s view, “of the ideal new Socialist
man.” His previous treatment at a psychiatric
hospital (psychiatry being an infamously
abused instrument of Soviet and Soviet-allied
persecution), paired with his increasingly
shambolic appearance, gave police sufficient
pretext to periodically incarcerate Tichý
— purportedly to “normalize” him, in
accordance with ideological standards — in
a psychiatric clinic. He would return a few
days later, shaven and bathed, only for the
abuse to repeat itself, mostly at the occasion
of political holidays. Tichý came to accept
his lot, readying a small suitcase before
each predicted visit of the police. He stoutly
refused, however, to accept normalization.
Tichý came to rent an attic in the home of
Buxbaum’s grandmother, and therein set up a
studio. But when the home was nationalized,
he was threatened with eviction, the space
that he occupied having been intended
for the use of a collective of leather-goods
menders. Standing his ground, Tichý was
forced out for “economic-political, social,
and also security reasons.” His paintings were
cast into the street; he never painted again.
But his creative spirit adapted. “The Stone-
Age photographer was the embodiment
of an insult to the small-town Communist
elite,” wrote Buxbaum. “He became the
living antithesis of progressive thought, of
the Marxist theory of history moving in a
straight line.”
What is one to make of Tichý? Do his
photographs truly smack of ar tistic
ingenuity, or are they simply the product
of serendipitous chance? Is the element of
the voyeuristic, the intrusive in his gaze to
be excused on the grounds of its aesthetic
merits? Tichý certainly had no illusions as
to his talent: “If you want to be famous, you
have to do something so badly that no one
else in the world does it as badly!” As to the
erotic: “That always [meant] police, prison
and mental institutions.” Perhaps to escape
or subvert those bonds, Tichý saw his only
recourse in surveillance, in the forbidden
look — in an undetectable glance so alike to
that of his tormentors. Whatever the truth
may be, Tichý offers at least one instructive
example: under conditions that are hostile to
self-expression, the last refuge of the artist
lies in affirming the banal, the workaday, the
commonplace poetry of life. In a world that is
brutalized and on fire, we may well be forced
to cobble together our own creative tools
from the debris and rubble. And, in face of
it all, may we affirm the simple beauty of our
raw humanity: it may be all that we have left.
 From 1961 until 1989, one of Berlin’s most
notable features was its “death strip.” An
austere belt of pavement, forty-three kilometres
long, and bordered by two parallel concrete
walls (perhaps the more notorious landmarks),
it was void of all save certain lethal defences:
dogs, guards, trenches, watchtowers, tripwires.
True to its name, some two-hundred and thirty-
nine persons met their death on the strip. The
overwhelming majority were male; most were
young. All ran westwards.
But then, Berlin could not have been
considered one city. Berlin, whole as it once
was, had been lacerated, mutilated, amputated.
Cloven in twain amid the fallout between the
Soviet Union and the other post-war Allies,
in 1949 it came under the split jurisdiction of
two fractious Germanies: East Berlin fell under
that of the Soviet-aligned German Democratic
Republic (GDR); West Berlin, the Federal
Republic of Germany. Westwards were to be
found Europe, democracy, hope, freedom;
eastwards, the Soviet Union, destitution,
despair, oppression. Or so it might well have
seemed to the few thousand escapees who,
seeking the promise of safety and reconciliation
in the West, risked all — even death — at the
Wall that divided the two Berlins.
Residents of the East had cause enough to
want out. East Germany, which the Stasi (the
GDR’s “Ministry for State Security,” better
described as its repressive secret police)
watched over with all-seeing eyes, was
governed by dint of force and fear. Through
constant surveillance, a network of covert
informants, intimidation, and other means
of waging psychological warfare (what
the Stasi sinisterly named Zersetzung, or
“decomposition”) against non-conformists and
dissidents, the Stasi ensured that “subversive
activities” were conducted, first, only with
utmost trepidation — and then not at all.
What was a young artist to do in East
Berlin? The very notion of art (aside from what
conformed to the school of “socialist realism,”
mandated for its propagandistic utility) was but libuše JArCoVJákoVá
a contradiction of life in the totalitarian East.
How to express oneself in a state that seeks
to negate the existence of the individual?
Surely, the impulse of the artist must have
been to capture life as it was, beneath as well
as beyond the gaze of the state. To document
its small joys and larger sorrows was to
subvert the down-stamping jackboot; to let
life stubbornly flourish, weed-like, beneath its
heel. Sheer, naked humanity would have been
transgressive; its honest beauty, affirming.
 Between 1977 and 1990, Gundula Schulze Eldowy
photographed the misery and hope that marked the faces
of her fellow East Germans. Raising the suspicions of the
Stasi (who, she claims, were concerned that the C.I.A. had
recruited her), she worked in conditions that sometimes
smacked of blatant paradox. “I must say,” she explained in
an interview with Exberliner, “that the GDR was like stone,
completely obdurate and closed. I started to open doors by
myself, going through to the people. … My neighbour
worked in a signal tower, and I said that I’d never been in
one and that I wanted to photograph there, so he took me
to the director and I explained my concept and the director
said ‘yes’. Everybody said ‘yes’, that was the wonder. …
Even though the GDR was so rigid, I always got permission
and was let in.”
The photographs that make up her collections, such as
Berlin in einer Hundenacht (“Berlin on a Dog’s Night”),
are stark: they consist of monochrome portraits of misfits
and the elderly, odd scenes and the everyday. Though not
overtly political, the backdrop of the GDR bleakly suffuses
them all. In an alleyway, stencilled facsimiles of the
communist heroes Wilhelm Pieck and Ernst Thälmann loom
benevolently while, in a corner of the frame, a young boy
looks down the barrel of a toy pistol at an unseen adversary.
Amid a blurry background, men in military regalia march
ceremonially behind their impromptu marshal, a man in a
raincoat with darkly sunken eyes whose swinging, twisted
hand echoes his haunting, twisted face. Less animated
subjects have a look of downtrodden longing. An out-of-
focus, elderly woman stares forlornly towards the camera
at an empty bottle; trapped under its glass is a figurine
in the shape of a ballerina. All too well, the captives
know their cages.

I understand nothing
an d
Life is pelting along
I don’t care.
too fast to understand.
I’m rarely sober.
 Things were little different elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc.
In Prague, the capital of communist Czechoslovakia, but
one club offered the sexually non-conforming the freedom
of open expression and a haven for love and friendship. The
venue, T-Club — “a place of ‘eternal carnival’” — attracted
the transgressive attentions of Libuse Jarcovjakova, who,
from 1983 to 1985, spent nearly every night photographing
and revelling among “outrageously camp queers,” “serious-
looking men who had fled their family,” “[b]eautiful young
men and beautiful young women. … Female footballers,
waiters, taxi drivers and most probably the secret police too.
… They all belonged here — belonged to a kind of pseudo-
family, to the community of one Prague gay club.” Within,
she documented the strain of the everyday masquerade,
the forced hypocrisy required of queer Czechs. “I could
never really shoot the real ‘documentary,’” she writes.
“There were many of those who wished to preserve their
‘everyday’ identity, and they would not like to be associated
with the T-Club.” The photographs are celebratory, candid,
and infectiously loving. Couples kiss, crowds dance,
queens coquet under false light as, outside, the darkness of
authoritarian night falls heavy over Czechoslovakia. In each
photograph is reflected a festive refutation of the Soviet
project; a laughing mockery of an authority so absurd as to
outlaw amusement.
Elsewhere in Jarcovjakova’s catalogue, the commonplace
is captured in similarly unflinching, sometimes surreal
terms. A man bends over before an oven in the nude; a
stunted Christmas tree stands starkly in a bathtub among
drying laundry; out of conservative trousers, beneath
a tucked-in shirt and a moustached face, a penis hangs
nonchalantly. Nudity in her portraits of herself as well as
of others is a frequent theme; she has photographed herself
while masturbating. It is as if, with utter openness, she
wishes to say, This is it, I am here, I am human. React as
you will, this is the truth.
Under heavy-handed as well as more tolerable systems of
authority, the sensibility that, to the last, affirms the life of
the human being is constant. The humanist gaze — towards
what is pathetically, forgivably, essentially human — is one
that will never cease to look on and startle. In simpler times
it “comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.” In
harder times it peers out from behind the steel, concrete,
and rubble and, resisting commands to avert itself, looks
on bravely still. Its subject is honesty; its fixation is the
beauty to be found in all truth, however brutal. In the
photographs of Eldowy and Jarcovjakova, the warmth and
resoluteness of the humanist gaze is crystallized, preserved
in light and shade; looking forward to days where things
are better but, for now, distilling for posterity that which
is already beautiful. In the wake of the next great disaster
(which becomes more imminent with every day), such a
gaze may be vital — not just for the perpetuation of the
human spirit, but by necessity: after the fall, humanity up-
close may be our only subject. And, during the recovery
of a human species clinging to survival, it may be more
crucial than ever to preserve its crude, residual beauty for
the unsuspecting future. May it look kindly on what it finds.
gundulA sChulze eldoWY
AlYs tomlinson / WWW.AlYstomlinson.Co.uk
 In the shadow of the colossal French Pyrenees, at the fringes of the historic
region of Occitanie, lies the town of Lourdes. There, a major Catholic shrine
has attracted scores of millions of pilgrims since visionary apparitions beset
a denizen in 1858. Some hundred and sixty years ago, at the nearby Grotto
of Massabielle, an illiterate peasant named Bernadette Soubirous claimed
to have received a rosary-like series visions of the Immaculate Conception.
Destitute and sickly, the fourteen-year-old asserted that the Virgin Mary had
instructed her to have a chapel built on the spot, the waters of which have
been said ever since to possess supernatural healing properties. Despite
being met initially with scepticism, Soubirous was deemed credible, then
blessed, then a saint: she was canonized Saint Bernadette of Lourdes,
patroness of bodily illness, in 1933. The fifty-odd-hectare site — called
the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes or, colloquially, the “Domain” —
offers the devout in their strictly allotted droves its coveted “Lourdes water”
for bathing and drinking. In addition to the springs and the holy Grotto
itself, the grounds of the Domain boast numerous places of worship, as
well as the offices of the Lourdes Medical Bureau (for investigating claims
of miraculous cures). Once centred economically on its prosperous market,
greater Lourdes, with its rash of hotels and giftshops, now may best be
described as a resort town.
It was in view of this hallowed ground that British photographer Alys
Tomlinson grew curious about pilgrimage and pilgrims. “I’m not a person of
any faith,” she has said, “but there was something in their simple faith that I
found very moving.” Inspired by the film Lourdes, she set off to photograph
“those who go to Lourdes and to create a narrative between the people and
the landscape ... and the spirituality and sense of hope that permeates the
Sanctuary of ‘Our Lady of Lourdes.’”
Tomlinson has made something of a specialty of her fascination with
itinerant worship. “Ex-Voto,” her most recent collection of photographs, “is
an extension of my previous work in Lourdes. Still intrigued by this place of
great spiritual contemplation and worship, I re-visited the project,” named
in this iteration for the offerings left at places of pilgrimage in thanks for
answered prayers, “with a different approach.” Eschewing colour for the
starker chiaroscuro of monochrome, she shot with a camera that seems
of another century. “This camera is probably about an eighth of my body
weight,” Tomlinson told The Guardian, “and you have to set [it] up using a
tripod and a hood.” But these choices were no mere gimmicks: “Shooting
in large format [sic] black and white slowed the process down and gave me
space to think” — all too fitting for her solemn subject matter.
From landscapes to portraits to close-ups of the titular offerings,
Tomlinson’s images situate the spiritual journeys of her pilgrims on the
material paths of their vows. Reminiscent of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky
or Paweł Pawlikowski, they exude a contemplative sort of melancholy;
a meditative stillness that owes in part to Tomlinson’s weighty choice of
camera. Crucifixes rubbed into rock or improvised from twigs; handwritten
invocations folded, tucked into stony nooks and clefts; prayer leaflets and
ribbon all litter the pilgrims’ trail, like markers. Cavernous hollows, woods,
marshlands, lakes, and churchyards bound their passage with as much (nigh
on pagan) sacred import. But the faces of the devout — all but upturned
in faithful expectation — are the most compelling evidence to suggest
that Tomlinson has photographed scenes not of today but out of Europe’s
pre-modern past. Women dressed in nuns’ habits and men as monks or
clerics — or, in one photograph, a young member of the military-religious
Order of Malta in uniform — evoke an older, slower world ignorant
of the coursing present.
What of that slower world? When today’s grinds to its inevitable halt,
perhaps a glance inward, as in Tomlinson’s art, will provide the last
sanctuary for the distressed conscience. The past that is conjured in “Ex-
Voto,” in any case, may not be so different from the world yet to come; to
be made primitive again by the errors of here and now. Under the surface
of serene, religious calm, one can imagine an uneasy premonition of
dread in “Ex-Voto.” If — when — that prophecy comes to be fulfilled, the
introspective stillness of Tomlinson’s photographs may likewise foretell
the bent of tomorrow’s aesthetics. Amid whatever after-storm quiet we may
find, let us hope that we might garner the means within to realize such
lasting peace — what we may well fail to bring about in the world we will
leave behind.
— Trevor Clarke
 I suspect that many of
the great cultural shifts
that prepare the way for political change
are largely aesthetic.
— J. G. Ballard
SHOCK . . .
OF
THE
NEW
On January 2, 1911, German painter Franz Marc took
his new friend Wassily Kandinsky to a concert by
Arnold Schoenberg. On this fateful evening, the
Viennese composer stunned the crowd with a strange
new music in which tonality had been completely
suspended. The crowd was confused if not dismayed,
but Marc and Kandinsky – they were riveted. After the
concert, the two painters relocated to a nearby café
where they rambled until the wee hours of the morning
about the fertile resonance between Schoenberg’s
music and Kandinsky’s painting.

For the months leading up to this evening, Kandinsky

had been sitting on the seed of a new art, but he
hadn’t yet dared to take the leap. While he had already
developed the philosophical foundations for abstract
art, he remained hesitant to abandon representation.
But the morning after the concert, he drafted several
quick sketches of the performance. By summer of that
same year, he was producing monumental paintings
that almost entirely effaced referential content.
Schoenberg’s atonal music had been a catalyst, a
midwife at the birth of abstraction. “Since that time,”
Kandinsky reflected, “I know what undreamed-
of possibilities color conceals within itself,” – a
revelation that “tore open before me the gates of the
realm of absolute art.”

— Natalia Illyin

WAssilY kAndinskY
The evolution of western aesthetics
is one of creeping abstraction
-- a turning away from the
natural world.
MArk tAnSey, “purıty teSt”, 1982. Oıl On CAnvAS
what is abstraction?

a utopian realm of pure form

universality of expression, of emotion, of thought
the lure of ininity

a glimpse into the spiritual structure of nature itself

or maybe an escape from nature

the loss of empathy
a fear of death
the inal victory of the logic freaks
the fatal law of Western civilization
JOHNNY RYAN.
John bAldessAri
 We’ve lost touch
with reality,
with nature,
with one another . . .

that’s why
we’re in
total post-truth
meltdown now . . .
morgAn Allen, “Cursed WolF”
so . . .
is this a
dead end . . .
dAmien CoulthArd

or a new
beginning?
ClAudiA AnduJAr, “untitled” From CAtrimAni indiAns-series, 1971-72. inhotim ColleCtion.

This month, the Yurok Tribal Council voted unanimously in

favor of a resolution establishing the rights of the Klamath River.
According to the Yurok Tribe, the resolution “establishes
the Rights of the Klamath River to exist, flourish, and naturally
evolve; to have a clean and healthy environment free from
human-caused climate change impacts; and to be free from
contamination by genetically engineered organisms.”
“This resolution provides another powerful tool to protect
our river, which has sustained the Yurok people since time
began,” said Joseph L. James, the Chairman of the Yurok Tribe.
“We have always and will always do everything in our power to
preserve and enhance the Klamath for all future generations.”
“We are sending a strong message that we now have an
additional legal mechanism to shield the Klamath against
those who might harm our most sacred resource,” added Toby
Vanlandingham, the Weitchpec District Representative on the
Yurok Tribal Council. “It is and always will be our responsibility
to defend this river by any means necessary.”
The Yurok Tribe says that the Klamath River has supported
“uncountable generations of Yurok people”, explaining that
the river is central to the Tribe’s ceremonial practices, food
security, and other important facets of the Yurok lifeway.
With this resolution, the Yurok Tribe becomes the fourth
Native American Tribe to adopt the Rights of Nature.
— John Ahni Schertow
 Hallelujah,
“the
sacred”
is
creeping
back!
emilY kAme kngWArreYe
 BIRTH OF
AN EXCITING
NEW POLITICAL
FORCE
rAYmond pettibon
AlBreCht dürer (1471-1528)
dAVid shrigleY
robbie ConAl
 My artistic heroes and mentors are Mira
nda July, Kurt Vonnegut, R. Crumb, Mau
Sendak, Roald Dahl, Beverly Cleary, Joh rice
n Waters, Janelle Monae, LiZzo, Pee Wee
Herman, Jim Henson, Jim Mahfood, Dee
vine, Wes Anderson, Octavia Butler
They excite me on my artistic journey for their silliness in navigating this shit show, aka
trash island. They accept the trash and are honest about the darkness. Their willingness
to confront inner conflict and anxiety combined with an ability to be open to nature and
a need for play. Empowerment through loving themselves in ugly glory.
Works of art that inspire me to crea
te: “Beauty is Embarrassing” a docume
“Midsommar” - the movie; “Where the ntary;
Wild Things Are” book and movie . . .
homeless guy named John who pulls and this
out his drumset every day and plays
streets of my town for the cars to hea it on the
r.
— Hobo Diva, Evelyn Amber Schmelling
My artistic heroes are Jean Dubuffet.
Jean-Michel Basquiat. Keith Haring.
Oliver sacks. David Lynch. Kurt Schwitt
ers. Robert Rauschenberg. jack Keroua
Richard Brautigan. Charles Bukowski. c.
they excite me with their celebration of failure and madness. the
use of ready made materials. the emphasis of the process. the
naive and immediate. championing spirit over technique.
I am moved by accidental artworks I
see and find in everyday situations: Gra
removal, hand drawn maps, children's ffiti
drawings, badly written ’no parking'
in love with folk art and artwork mad signs. I am
e out of necessity, and with limited reso
patchwork quilts, murals, mosaics. I enjo urces,
y finding the poetry in the mundane
accidental beauty in something that or the
has no other way of being made.
— David Shillinglaw
SEND YOUR
writings & poetry to
editor@adbusters.org
photographs & artwork to
artdirector@adbusters.org
Who dis
JACk kirtleY. JACk kirtleY is the CArtoonist behind Foreign eYe Comix

The World Bank predicts that there will be 140 million

climate refugees by 2050; the UN thinks it might
be more like 200 million, or even, in the worst-case
scenario, a billion. — Francis Gooding
we don’t need a caption here
 ard. the
the terrain of the old gu
“brutal aesthetics” are tion
br ut ali ty be in g pe rfe ct fodder for recupera
shock of d
ar ketin g. gi ve m e a beautiful, ecological an
and m
ime. — Warren draper
humane aesthetic anyt

steVe delmonte
 © berger & WYse. see WWW.bergerAndWYse.Com For
more CArtoons And inFormAtion

steVen Vogel emmA FrenCh

dAVid grAnnemAn
dAVid grAnnemAn

WEB
WEb WIz Hei Lam Ng
WEbsLINgEr Joey Malbon
WEb coNsuLtANt Hawson Shi
WEb ELvEs Deepsimran Gill, Zongxi Li
 hey
have you ever
thought about the
fact that all we
writers have to work
with is the 26 letters
of the alphabet . . .
 . . .but we have lots of
emotionally
charged typefaces ...
 . . . and
of course,
we have
the
magic
of the
s
e
m
i
c
o
l
o
n
 The semicolon is a miracle of prosody.
It can create rhythm and structure;
can be weighty or breathless; can hold
a sentence back or flick it forward
“like a stone skipping across water.”
A semicolon can be like a sigh. In a
stunning passage from “The Big Sleep,”
Raymond Chandler’s semicolon is a
small hiccup of heartbreak.

— Cecelia Watson, Semicolon

 So what’s quality writing?
Well, what it’s always been:
knowing how to put your head
in the dark, knowing how to
jump into the void, knowing
that literature is fundamentally
a dangerous trade.

— Roberto Bolaño,
Between Parentheses

photo is bY mAthieu bourgois but Who did the CollAge?


For the bourgeoisie and
the petite-bourgeoisie, life
is a party. They have
one every weekend. The
proletariat doesn’t have
parties. Just funerals with
rhythm. That’s going to
change. The exploited are
going to throw a big party.
Memory and guillotines.
Intuiting it, acting it out on
certain nights, inventing
edges and humid corners
for it, like caressing the
acid eyes of the new spirit.
—Roberto Bolaño,
Infrarealist Manifesto
The work of the late Roberto Bolaño has grown
even more urgent in the years since his death.
At the heart of his novels is the idea that the
concentration camp never went away for good—
that the horrors of the early twentieth century are
coming back at strange new latitudes.
Having left his native Chile in his late teens,
Bolaño spent the better part of his youth drifting
around Central America and Mexico before
eventually ending up in Spain, where he took
up writing novels as an alternative to washing
dishes. His longest and most acclaimed book, the
posthumous 2666, is a study of the last hundred
or so years of mass death, stretching all the way
from the corpse-strewn waste-dumps of present-
day industrial Mexico to the abandoned shtetls of
Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
His other masterwork, The Savage Detectives,
follows a generation of Latin American artists sent
into exile by a wave of state terror that enveloped
the continent virtually until the millenium. Latter-
day and more desperate beatniks, his characters
sketch the potential for art in a world where the
death squad, the prison camp and the mass grave
have become the rule and not the exception of
politics as such.
The definitive moment in Bolaño’s own political
and artistic education was undoubtedly the coup
d’état in Chile. Living in Mexico when Salvador
Allende came to power, Bolaño quickly made
plans to return to Chile in order to support the
newly elected government in building socialism.
Hitchhiking most of the way from Mexico City
to Santiago, Bolaño arrived in the city just a
few days before the military junta stormed
the presidential palace and forced Allende
to commit suicide. Suspected of left-wing
sympathies, Bolaño was pulled off a public bus
by government forces and put in jail. He spent his
eight-day stint in prison writing poetry, begging
food off of his cell mates (the guards hadn’t given
him any) and trying to sleep over the sound
of other inmates being tortured. Expecting
to be transferred to a prison camp or tortured When people read his books
himself, Bolaño was eventually released thanks they have an uncontrollable
to two guards that knew him from secondary desire to hang the author in the
school. He left the country shortly after, making town square. I can’t think of a
the trip north stone-broke and with his dream higher honor for a writer.
of a socialist Chile destroyed. — Roberto Bolaño, Between
Returning to Mexico City, Bolaño was Parentheses
determined to make a name for himself as a
writer. Borrowing a phrase from painter Roberto
Matta, Bolaño inaugurated his own artistic
program: “blow the brains out of the cultural
establishment.” Revolting against the stodgy and
often apolitical nature of the Latin American
literary scene, Bolaño became the ringleader
of a group of avant-garde poets and wastrels
dedicated to harassing the grandees of Mexican
letters. Known for his acerbic poetic output,
Bolaño was equally famous for interrupting
the events of writers he considered sell-outs
or talentless—at one point even sabotaging a
reading given by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz.
The life of Roberto Bolaño is a testament to
how much someone with a bomb-thrower’s
spirit can accomplish without ever racking
up a body count. Artistically innovative and
politically uncompromising, his work is an
invitation to action in the face of disaster, to not
stand mute among the rubble, but to instead
fend off the calamities on the horizon.
— Joeseph Moore
bAnksY
 Brutal days, to be resisted, often demand brutality in
kind. In such times, marked as they are by the fear and
uncertainty that naturally metastasize out of truth’s
debasement, there is but one bold act from which all other
acts of dissent may precede. That is to tell — with utter,
brutal frankness — the truth.
The most potent means of reckoning with uncomfortable
truths are stories. Horrors become recognizable as such
only when they are remembered and recounted. “Others,”
whether seeming or actual, become familiar solely through
the telling of tales that bridge like with unlike. And stories
— powerful, enduring stories — are surely impossible to
craft without language.
Language is among the deining achievements of the
human species. It alone enables ideas to make the near-
impossible leap from one mind to another. It is the
medium of our weightiest thoughts. Without this genius
for sharing thoughts, humanity would be no different
from any other ape: the absence of language would mean
no stories, which would mean no culture, which would
mean no memory, which would mean no identity. We
are bound up in the narratives that we claim as our own,
and in the words that we use to tell them. The essence
of individuality — our relationship to our very selves —
depends inextricably on language.
So, when language is abused, we expose our most
intimate selves to further and wider abuses. The erosion
of the meaning bestowed on words leads to the erosion of
our ability to articulate our thoughts, both to others and
to ourselves. This erosion, in turn, leads to the destruction
of our critical faculties; of our ability to distinguish
between truth and falsehood.
Finally, when truth and untruth bleed into one —
when we look from truth to untruth, and from untruth to
truth, and from truth to untruth again; but already it is
impossible to say which is which — we become unable to
discern what is moral from what is immoral. And when
we can no longer distinguish between right and wrong,
the gates that protect our freedom, decency, and autonomy
— all that allows us, by right, to fulill our potential as
human beings — are left open to the wolves.
How can we best arm ourselves in defense of truth’s
vitality? To tell and safeguard the truth, it is necessary to
be able to identify its opposite. First, we must recognize
its enemies.
 ENEMY No. 1: Disappearing and
Bastardized Words
The most profound horror of George Orwell’s
harrowing inal novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is also
its most real. It is the horror of a language decimated
to the degree that thought itself becomes impossible
outside ideologically permitted limits. In the novel,
an all-ruling party-state (“Ingsoc”) decrees ever-
slimmer oficial dictionaries, with the aim of replacing
traditional English (“Oldspeak”) with its barren
bastard, “Newspeak.” “The purpose of Newspeak,”
wrote Orwell, “was not only to provide a medium of
expression for the world-view and mental habits proper
to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes
of thought impossible”:
It was intended that when Newspeak had
been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak
forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a
thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc
— should be literally unthinkable, at least so
far as thought is dependent on words. … This
was done partly by the invention of new words,
but chiely by eliminating undesirable words
and by stripping such words as remained of
unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of
all secondary meanings whatever.
To that end, words such as “free” could no longer
mean “intellectually free,” or “free to speak,” but could
be used instead only in contexts such as “This dog is In a
free from lice” or “This ield is free from weeds.” Words
such as “bad” were eliminated completely (and replaced
with vile contortions such as ungood). Other terms —
time of
thoughtcrime, doublethink, Big Brother, and memory universal
hole — endure in the (somewhat paradoxically) enriched
English language of reality. deceit,
Though based on the totalitarianism to which he bore
witness during the twentieth century, Orwell’s insights
are no less relevant to the twenty-irst. Today’s parlance
is riddled with inanities such as “alternative facts,”
“post-truth,” and “fake news.” They have replaced the
following perfectly good, honest descriptors: “lies,”
“lying passing as a normal and respectable habit,” and
“lies told by the (real or purported) media,” respectively.
Even the once objective notion of abstract numeracy
is under threat. Patently false yet doubly defended
claims of Donald Trump’s having drawn “the largest
audience ever to witness an inauguration, period” bring
to mind the absurd doublethink phrase “two plus two
equals ive,” belief in which is enforced by Ingsoc
to demonstrate complete and slavish and arbitrary
obedience to the Party’s doctrine. Nineteen Eighty-
Four’s protagonist, Winston Smith, wonders whether
widespread belief in the slogan is proof that it is true
despite his misgivings. This fallacious logic is typiied
by Trump’s redoubled justiication for racist comments
 made on Twitter (wherein he suggested that four non-
white congresswomen “go back” to “the crime infested
places from which they came”): that “many people
agree” with his sentiments.
Winston correctly noted the danger of this sort of
thinking. “Freedom,” he noted, “is the freedom to say
that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else
follows.” The barbarity of the tyrant is made plain by
his linguistic savaging of truth. The irst sign is the
disappearance and bastardization of words.

ENEMY No. 2: Sinister Euphemisms

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,”
Orwell took issue with writing “designed to make lies
sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an
appearance of solidity to pure wind”:
[P]olitical speech and writing are largely the
defence of the indefensible. … Thus political
language has to consist largely of euphemism …
Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air,
the inhabitants driven out into the countryside,
the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on ire
with incendiary bullets: this is called paciication.
Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms
and sent trudging along the roads with no more
than they can carry: this is called transfer of
population or rectiication of frontiers. People
are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in
the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in
Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination
of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is
needed if one wants to name things without
calling up mental pictures of them.
It is thus that Venezuelan “Operations for the
telling the Liberation of the People” have resulted in the unlaw-
ful torture and murder, at the hands of death squads, of
truth is a thousands of civilians. It is thus that Chinese gulags
revolutionary for the suppression of ethno-religious minorities are
termed “re-education” centres. It is thus that xeno-
act. phobia, intolerance, and supremacy masquerade as
“heritage,” “tradition,” and “pride.” It is also thus that
refugees are derided as “illegal aliens.” Furthermore, it
is thus that the current climate crisis has, without much
complaint, come to be known more mildly as “climate
change,” and its deniers as “skeptics” — as if to imply
that “change” might not be so urgent after all, and that
- G. Orwell deniers’ claims differ justiiably (instead of ignorantly)
from the scientiic consensus.
In the same essay, Orwell wrote that “[w]hen the
general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”
Similarly, for the “atmosphere” (here, meant both
metaphorically and not) to improve, language must
also be saved. To that end, insidious euphemisms must
be outed for what they truly are: attempts to slyly make
that which is intolerable seem tolerable.
 ENEMY No. 3: Censorship
Freedom dies in silence. The erasure of facts suspends, by default, their very evaluation.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. truth Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. must Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. circulate Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. freely. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
And that is how censorship leads to self-censorship, which leads to silence, which leads to
the death of freedom.

ENEMY No. 4: Cliché

Clichés are not only unoriginal; they are dangerous. Cliché is the thoughtless
regurgitation of received ideas. To that end, cliché is among the ultimate instruments
of ideology. In his study of “brainwashing” in Communist China, Thought Reform and
the Psychology of Totalism, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton wrote that “the language
of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché”:
The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into
brief, highly reductive, deinitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and
easily expressed. They become the start and inish of any ideological analysis.
Here, we ind the intentions of Newspeak fulilled. When language — the medium
of thought — becomes reduced in its scope to a predetermined set of stock phrases,
all independent and original thinking becomes impossible. All critical, all free
thinking becomes impossible. This is the irst decisive step toward unfreedom.
Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem (the book that birthed the notion
of “the banality of evil”) of how, at his trial in 1961, titular Holocaust-organizer and
Nazi war-criminal Adolf Eichmann confused the presiding judge with his inarticulate
manner of expressing himself:
Dimly aware of a defect that must have plagued him even in school …
[Eichmann] apologized, saying, ‘Oficialese … is my only language.’ But the
point here is that oficialese became his language because he was genuinely
incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.
 And of his inability to communicate at his trial:
… Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory,
repeated word for word the same stock phrases
and self-invented clichés … The longer one
listened to him, the more obvious it became
that his inability to speak was closely connected
with an inability to think … No communication
was possible with him, not because he lied but
because he was surrounded by the most reliable
of all safeguards [i.e., clichés] against the words
and the presence of others, and hence against
reality as such.
Finally, writing of then-common but specious
“explanations” for the horrors of the Third Reich:
All these clichés have in common that they make
judgment superluous and that to utter them is
devoid of all risk.
If the association of clichés with one of the twenty-
irst century’s most abhorrent criminals (and two of its
most ruthless regimes) is not quite enough, consider
the following (softened) clichés: “immigrants are
criminals and rapists,” “people of Middle Eastern origin
are terrorists,” the same “wish to instate Shariah law
in the West,” “non-white people wish to ‘replace’ the
white race,” and so on. Most inlammatory, resentful,
hateful, and generalizing rhetoric (in short, the open
endorsement of ignorance) can be reduced to slogan-
like clichés — again, according to Lifton, “brief, highly
reductive, deinitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized
and easily expressed.”
By “simply throwing your mind open and letting the
ready-made phrases come crowding in,” Orwell wrote,
clichés can “construct your sentences for you — even
think your thoughts for you.” A language that is reduced
to clichéd, bumper-sticker slogans is not the equal
of thought — it is its pure, unmitigated opposite. And
an unthinking person is the ideal vessel for corrosive,
wrongheaded — and, yes, dangerous — ideas.

ENEMY No. 5: Cynicism

Cynicism is lazy fatalism dressed up as rational
skepticism. The very nonchalance of the cynic betrays
his apathy; it absolves him of any responsibility to act.
“Why bother,” he says, “when there is nothing to be done
that is worth doing?” Yet this is never true: there is always
something to be done — however small the act; however
dire the circumstances.
To be a cynic is to concede to the forces of wrongdoing.
If a despot cannot successfully con you (for despotism
necessitates an abuse of conidence), or if a naysayer
cannot doom-and-gloom you into submission, then
he can at least hope that you will give in to cynicism
— that is, to resigned passivity. “The government’s
fucked. There are no viable alternatives. Why even
vote?” “The planet’s fucked. Why not have a good time
of it?” “The culture’s fucked and there’s no ixing it.
Why participate in society at all?” No one who, in the
face of adversity, has ever made signiicant change for
the better has thought (except in moments of doubt)
in this way. And many a cynic has abetted — whether
unconsciously, indifferently, or secretly — the very
wrongs that comfortably conirm his pessimism.
Cynicism belies fear: a cynic is too reluctant to stand
for anything because, out of trepidation, he cannot
think or act with conviction. Sunny, naïve idealism and
the motivation to act are not synonymous; optimism
necessitates hard work, and the tenacity to act in the face
of overwhelming odds. Cynicism, however, demands
nothing but the assurance and safety of renounced
responsibility. It is the reaction of the shut-in.
Moreover, cynicism justiies ignorance. “If nothing
that can be known can change anything, then why
bother knowing anything?” The same trite manner of
reasoning infects everything in the eyes of the cynic.
“There is nothing so pitiful,” said Maya Angelou, “as
a young cynic because he has gone from knowing
nothing to believing nothing.” To the cynic, everything
— honesty and dishonesty, good and bad, facts and lies
— is lattened to the same plane. The cynic’s ignorance
allows him to believe nothing because he ignores the
facts that would show his dismissive platitudes to be
unfounded in — or rather, contrary to — the truth.

* * *
The integrity of language (and, by necessity, of truth)
is facing a trial of hazards. Yet, if history offers any
indication, language, and its ability to communicate
the truth, have shown remarkable resilience, even if
at times they have threatened expiry or been rendered
dormant. It is a testament to the seeming will of truth
that it has managed, like so many stubborn weeds, to
crop up in the most hostile and unexpected of places,
at the most inopportune of times (for its enemies). But
this does not exempt any one of us from vigilance.
A phrase that dates from the Watergate scandal’s
fraught days for truth (and which now serves as The
Washington Post’s motto) bears repeating: “democracy
dies in darkness.” Better yet: democracy dies in silence.
If we cease to vocally defend the freedom of language,
we will see a waning in the vitality of truth. Then,
unfreedom will have its day. So, to prevent this day
from ever following night, it is essential to take stock
of the truth’s wellbeing and its safeguarding in a robust
language. The brutal reality in which we ind ourselves
begs a brutal aesthetic to match: the aesthetics of
resolute, unwavering truth.
— Trevor Clarke
 ARE YOU A

COOL MAKER
COOL BREAKER?
we morph into a
profession of
cultural
warriors . . .
 . . . start
inhibiting impulses
scrambling habits
modulating desires . . .
 . . . we
create
a flurry
of new
ambiences
& psychic
possibilities
to live by . . .
 .. . then,
finally

iVAn Argote
 .. . we shift
the coordinates
of reality

ArTS
crEAtIvE dIrEctor Pedro Inoue
Art dIrEctor James Callaghan
crEAtIvE AssIstANt Julia Kim
WEb Art Kerem Dogurga
 NOT STYLE,
Tone or Ambience,
BUT

S H O C K
T E M P O
R H Y T H M
is what
s
21st century aesthetic
will be all about
dAVid grAnnemAn
AAron Johnson, “trump rAllY”, ACrYliC on pAper. WWW.AAronJohnsonArt.Com
sCott Cook
mAnAsVini. s
CArolinA suArez guerrero
rAY mAterson
CourtesY henrY boxer gAllerY, london
ben hiCkling
ClıFFOrd hArper, ClASS WAr COMıx (1973)
send your comments and suggestions to cam
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If the 20th century
was the century of
the straight line, of
a yang rationality,
of modernism and
abstraction,
. . . the 21st century will be the
century of the curve, of yin, of
harmony and building with nature.
And if we don’t get it right, if
we cannot recover our innate
empathy, find balance, and come
up with a new aesthetic to live by,
then it will be a century of hubris,
brutality and mayhem on a scale
never seen before . . .
 Crystelle Vu and Julian
What is the sound of extinction? With apt gravity, artist-activists
Bearing “the stark neo-
oliver have chosen the solemn timbre of a traditional Chau Gong.
ss (for time, swiftly depleting)
primitivist image” of the Extinction symbol — an hourgla
instrum ent is called “the Extinction
within a circle (for the planet) — their automated
species extinct ion” — about 27,000 losses
gong.” Austerely, it “beats to the rhythm of
s. Contra st their igure (betwe en one and ive per
each year, or one every nineteen minute
“backg round rate” of species ’ extinct ions. this relatively
year) for the pre-human average
sixty-ive million years
diminutive rate dates to the ifth (and last) major extinction event
themselves: humanity,
ago, when the dinosaurs met their demise. the numbers speak for
as all too often, is uniquely culpable.

CrYstelle Vu And JuliAn oliVer

The Extinction Gong - it rings everytime a species goes extinct - every 19 minutes.

the gong intones the barren melody of the sixth Extinction, which is currently ravaging
the diversity of life on earth. Its music is at once ancient and contemporary; looking
both backwards at better times for the prospects of non-human life and forwards at
the desolate arch of the future. viewed from the front, the Extinction gong seems
(despite its iconography) a relic of the past. from the rear, however, it is revealed to
be an object of modern mechanical design, it as it is with “mallet, electro-magnet,
audio transducer, embedded computer and 3g downlink” — this last to receive word
of any new extinction and announce it ceremonially with four gong-strikes in quick
succession, accompanied by a synthetic voice’s declaring the extinct species’ Latin
name. this contrast, according to the artists, “expresses a brutal and contradicting
irony”: “while advances in science and technology augment the devastating impact
of human endeavours over wild habitats, so are they our best means of studying and
understanding it.” the music of the present — and of a future we may not be able to
avoid — is the grim, unceasing chime of a death knell.
 F ri e n d s ,
c o m ra de s ,
b ro t h e r s ,
sist ers ,

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POSTMASTER: send address changes to Adbusters Media Foundation PO Box 658, 250 H St., Blaine, WA 98230-9935. Single-issue price: $10.00. Annual Subscription Price: USA
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It won’t take an army — a guerrilla battalion of a few hundred
of us creatives will be enough to provide the critical spark
for a wider insurrection.

through trial and error and collaborative refinement, entertaining

all and dismissing nothing, we will engender a steady stream
of memes and stories, videos and happenings, provocations
and pranks that articulate the absurd, indifferent, cold-blooded
unsustainability of it all; the perversity of a system that thrives on
the death of nature and the scored backs of future generations.

then we will ignite an effigy of that dead schema. Among renewing

flames, our ideas, too, will take to fire. Sequestered lightning will
come uncorked, each forking bolt unleashing a tempest amid the
false azure of the sleeping mind. Hundreds will grow to thousands;
thousands will grow to millions. Wave after paradigm-shifting wave
of cognitive dissonance — portents of life-affirming epiphanies; of
devastating moments of truth — will crash upon apathetic shores.
Meme by meme, protest by protest, mindbomb by mindbomb,
we will dismantle the bonds of our mental subjugation and point
towards a revitalizing vision of our future — new ways to live, love
and think — a redemptive agenda for planet Earth.

It won’t take an army to spark the global mind shift. If a few

hundred of us dedicated mavericks get together, we can change
the aesthetics of taste and desire forever.

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rob blAke