Die Antwoord: a provocative celebration of otherness
"If Die Antwoord are a joke, they're a painfully acute one. This over-the-top South African rap-rave trio, comprising rappers Ninja and Yolandi Visser and a hulking DJ called Hi-Tek, purport to represent 'zef', a strain of working-class/underclass Boer' culture that perhaps most closely equates to our own pejorative term 'chav'.
The band's co-founder and frontman, Watkin Tudor Jones, aka Ninja, has previously appeared in a host of similar conceptual art-rap projects and situationist pranks."
(Ian Gittins, 16 November 2010)
Fig.1 Die Antwoord "Zef Side"
Fig.2 Die Antwoord "I Fink U Freeky", Directed by Roger Ballen & NINJA, Director of Photography Melle Van Essen, Edited by Jannie Hondekom @ Left, Post Production by Blade.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Architecture, sculpture, and natural form
"in 2001, Peter Wollen wrote a rather impressionistic piece on Situationism for the New Left Review, in which he discussed the Danish artist Asger Jorn and his 1948 essay, 'What is Ornament?'. Jorn, a founding Situationist and also an appallingly sloppy painter, had a quaint view of art:
For Jorn, the pairing of European versus oriental ran together with other pairings, such as classical versus spontaneous, idealist versus materialist, Apollonian versus Dionysiac, with Jorn supporting the second term throughout-oriental, materialist, spontaneous, Dionysiac, and so on.
Further, for Jorn:
the nature of art is not to imitate the external forms of nature (naturalism) but to create natural art. Natural sculpture which is true to its material will be identical to nature's forms without seeking to imitate.
Jorn thus compares a minaret to a horsetail, and a totem-pole to a chestnut branch; the non-Western forms are seen as more organic, more rooted in the natural world."
(Conrad H. Roth)
[A critique of a romantic and 'essentialist' view of art and design.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Architecture, sculpture, and natural form
"in 2001, Peter Wollen wrote a rather impressionistic piece on Situationism for the New Left Review, in which he discussed the Danish artist Asger Jorn and his 1948 essay, 'What is Ornament?'. Jorn, a founding Situationist and also an appallingly sloppy painter, had a quaint view of art:
For Jorn, the pairing of European versus oriental ran together with other pairings, such as classical versus spontaneous, idealist versus materialist, Apollonian versus Dionysiac, with Jorn supporting the second term throughout-oriental, materialist, spontaneous, Dionysiac, and so on.
Further, for Jorn:
the nature of art is not to imitate the external forms of nature (naturalism) but to create natural art. Natural sculpture which is true to its material will be identical to nature's forms without seeking to imitate.
Jorn thus compares a minaret to a horsetail, and a totem-pole to a chestnut branch; the non-Western forms are seen as more organic, more rooted in the natural world."
(Conrad H. Roth)
[A critique of a romantic and 'essentialist' view of art and design.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Psychogeography and the Dérive
"The situationists' desire to become psychogeographers, with an understanding of the 'precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals', was intended to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which everyday life is presently conditioned and controlled, the ways in which this manipulation can be exposed and subverted, and the possibilities for chosen forms of constructed situations in the post-spectacular world. Only an awareness of the influences of the existing environment can encourage the critique of the present conditions of daily life, and yet it is precisely this concern with the environment which we live which is ignored."
(Sadie Plant)
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Theory of The Dérive
"In a dérive [literally: "drifting"] one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a d?rive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones."
(Guy Debord, 1956)
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
