Suchergebnisse

An Experiment with Google Translate

Introduction

This paper discusses the controversial "Be Stupid" advertising campaign by Diesel, recipient of the Grand Prix Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival (2010). Banned in some countries for its potentially negative impact on children, this campaign employs theatrical staging combined with provocative slogans, such as "Stupid Might Fail. Smart Doesn't Even Try." Illustrated with orginal images inspired by Diesel, the paper refers to prominent theorists and artists (from Derrida to Warhol) to consider the complex (and productive) relationship between translation and performance.

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"Paris Wall Flowers, Moscow Wall Wars" is intended as an introduction to the themed issue on Translating Street Art, inspired in part by Guy Debord and his associates from the Situationist International (SI). The issue's international cast of contributors trace various contemporary expressions of the "dérive" and the "detournament" as found in many diverse spheres from graffiti to defaced monuments to "subvertising." Following in the footsteps of the SI's collage-like publications, Translating Street Art incorporates poetry, photography, scholarly essays, and personal accounts. "Paris Wall Flowers, Moscow Wall Wars" discusses two graffiti sites in Paris and Moscow, and considers the importance of their locations, as well as the distinction between street art and graffiti, and the fate of the unofficial genres in today's mainstream culture.

"Death in Vienna" is intended as an introduction to this themed issue on The Dark Spectacle: Landscapes of Devastation in Film and Photography. Drawing on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, the articles gathered here address the representation of unsettling subject matter (war, ecological catastrophe, destructive urbanization) in a variety of visual media. The collection's specific focus is on the important role played by space in the depiction of disturbing events. Do images portraying death and destruction generate documents, or do they create works of art? Does their beauty drain "attention from the sobering subject?" "Death in Vienna" addresses these and other related questions with reference to Yevgeny Khaldei's photography, specifically a shocking image he took in Vienna during the final days of the World War II. Together with Sontag, this article also questions our "right to look" at images of extreme suffering.

A personal account of a Moscow putsch, this short essay employs Michel De Certeau's distinction between the public and secret space of the city. In extending De Certeau, the article applies his work to the realm of photography and juxtaposes the official and private images of the putsch. "Scenes from the Putsch" is intended as a prologue to this themed issue that gather images and texts from around the world and pays tribute to De Certeau's notion of the "second, poetic geography" understood by the contributors as related to the secondary or unofficial connotations of spaces, as well as more literally to marginal destinations located outside of conventional tourist routes.

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This collaboration, featuring poetry by Christine Wiesenthal and photography by Elena Siemens, connects domestic spaces to the social, public and commercial sphere of the street: to relationships, traffic, gossip, and sundry forms of "dirty laundry." In his essay on "Naples," Walter Benjamin states: "Porosity is the inexhaustible law of the life of this city, reappearing everywhere" (170). "Buildings and actions," he explains, "interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen constellations" (169). He adds: "The stamp of the definitive is avoided" (169). This unique characteristic of Naples, its porosity, also surfaces in the "unforeseen constellations" of Wiesenthal's The Laundry Cycle, and
Siemens' images of Tel Aviv.