viz.

How does the space in which protest art appears affect the ways in which people respond to it? Or, even, if they see it as a protest at all?


In my class the other day, we talked about protest art. Among other things (Shepard Fairey), we looked at anti-war peace protester Brian Haw. Haw has lived in a peace camp in Parliament Square in Britain since June 2, 2001, remaining at the site full time, leaving only for court appearances.

I ran across an interesting blog on Lens Culture that argues that a recent French magazine cover (posted below) equates Obama to a young, inexperienced boy.

Blogger Jim Casper writes:

This magazine is currently on the racks at news stands all over Paris, and the cover image has become one of those giant back-lit advertisements that blare from the outsides of kiosks on the streets, and ads at bus stops, and posters lining the hallways of the metro stations.

Yuck!

So I've put off posting about this image because I find both it and PETA's numerous ways of using women in confusing and often objectified ways distasteful. They've titled one of their latest campaigns "Milk Gone Wild."

A just as smarmy take on Joe Francis' "Girls Gone Wild," PETA's current campaign wants to draw a connection between hot women and the dangers of drinking milk. But for me, the images they use don't add up to making any kind of supportive visual argument. Instead, they lose credibility. (Update: Some of the images below the fold might not be safe for work.)

While scrolling through HollaBackNYC, a site that allows users to post pictures of those that harass them on the street, I came across two websites that seemed like great visual rhetoric resources. The Just Seeds Visual Resistance Artists' Cooperative offers a blog, resources, as well as information about current projects and artists. The picture below comes from a 2004 project from the Street Art Workers entitled "Whose Media?" You can also find archived material from the group's previous website here.
Just wanted to share!

I ran across this via Feministing.com, and thought these almost-ads needed to be on the website. The backstory for these ads is that an ad agency pitched them to a running company, which passed on them. They are advertising sports bras, supposedly in a humorous way. They seem menacing to me:

See the other two ads after the jump:

The above picture comes from a website that offers pageant photo retouching. Creepy, huh? It came up during a Google search after I read this article in Newsweek about the rising trend among parents to have their children's grade school pics retouched, as early as the second grade.

I had to share this.

If you go to George Vlosich's website you will see his extensive collection of Etch-A-Sketch drawings, one of which is pictured below. In the "Early Times" section of his website, you can find this description of his work:

"Should buying sex toys be as easy as buying a gun?"

On Feministing the bloggers who write for the site have started vlogging (video blogging). These first vlogs feature several of the website's various writers explaining how they came to be involved with the site.

Recently on Muslim Media Watch , a blog post discussed what the author termed "Veil Fetish Art" (full disclosure: I found a link to this article while I was reading Feministing.com ).