cheryl meeker

A week of cognitive dissonance and direct action

2012-01-26T18:11:00.000-08:00

image: Food Bank of America

By Cheryl Meeker
Re-posted from Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It, January 24, 2012

What do we do when the government shockingly proves it already has the power to do one day what we were opposing the prior day? It is more than disquieting to see the government brutally illustrating the fact that the U.S. is a society that simply does not any longer believe in due process. Glenn Greenwald reports on the cognitive dissonance produced by the SOPA/PIPA opposition, victory, and subsequent seizure of Megaupload.

And what does it mean when the only “anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War” advocating presidential candidate is Ron Paul? Greenwald, again, makes the case for avoiding mindless partisanship and for allowing space for a real public debate, in part by countering our “inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match.” Read Greenwald’s nuanced analysis in “Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies”.

The answer from OccupySF has been to get down to business, by focusing on the financial district using direct action planned by a diverse horizontal hierarchy of community and affinity groups. OccupySF refused to limit the scope of specific injustices to highlight with a day long schedule of multi-faceted actions that drew global press as reporters and photographers attempted to cover and capture the variety of challenges to financial institutions and the mainstream narrative that were brought to bear publicly on Friday.

image: The Black Blob

Dialectical-materialist philosopher Slavoj Žižek notes the ironic fact that today the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege. Read his analysis of the Occupy movement and of the signs we are all seeing that the capitalist system is no longer capable of self-regulated stability; as he says, it is a system that is threatening to run out of control.

"Profound Ambivalence" by Dan and Cheryl for 100 Performances in the Hole

2011-12-11T18:01:00.000-08:00

"Profound Ambivalence" by Dan and Cheryl
Third Strike: 100 Performances for the Hole
SOMARTS, San Francisco
Dec. 10, 2011

Text for "Profound Ambivalence"

Frame Capitalism and the Conference of Polluters

(Original edit was posted on Monday, December 5, 2011 at Capitalismisover.com. This edit produced for a 2 minute piece by Dan and Cheryl at 100 Performances in the Hole, Dec 10, 2010.) Text by Cheryl Meeker

We in the west think that Darfur was torn apart due to ethnic conflict, while according to David Morse it was a resource war. He writes:

“The most sophisticated technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack black African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil deposits.

Why are the dots never connected between wars like those in Darfur and exploitation by the oil industry? Morse points to the subsidies provided to media by the car industry… the slickest, most fantasy-driven ads: the car ads.

The ideology that dominates our media is so strong that alternative narratives are taken with a minimum of seriousness, as Slavoj Zizek points out, without the necessity of the kind of prohibition of films dealing with time travel and alternate history as happened in China in April. But — try to imagine another system here in the US? “It is easy for us to imagine the end of the world (says Zizek)– see numerous apocalyptic films, but not end of capitalism.”

At the failing Durban climate talks, civil society activists erupted in protest yesterday, blocking the plenary halls, chanting “Climate Justice Now!” “Don’t Kill Africa!” “World Bank out of Climate Finance,” “No Carbon Trading,” and “No REDD!”

Anne Petermann, director of Global Justice Ecology Project, ejected from the meeting, said: “I took this action today because I believe this process is corrupt, this process is bankrupt, and this process is controlled by the One Percent”

Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace Director, also ejected, wrote to negotiators, “Twenty years after our victory against apartheid here in S Africa, with great urgency we call for a similar breakthrough” -- “You may not have felt it inside the rarefied air-conditioned corridors of the conference centre, but a restless anger stalks this land – driven by a new apartheid that has trapped half of humanity in a deadly embrace of poverty, inequality and hunger”

“Our institutions – local, national and global – are rapidly losing legitimacy,” Naidoo wrote. “Someday soon – the victims of rising temperatures will find their voice. Your job is to meet their hopes before you meet their anger.”

Meanwhile – here in the US, it is business as usual. In fact, Fox Business blames the new Muppet movie and its predecessors for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Dan and Cheryl are a product of Dan Spencer and Cheryl Meeker

SFMOMA OPEN SPACE collaboration with Meg Schiffler and Ishan Clemenco

2011-07-06T17:32:00.000-07:00

I Choose for You: Meg Chooses for Cheryl (Part 3)

Text and images by Cheryl Meeker

In a simple way, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s video installation, Lahja (The Present), might either be viewed as an investigation of internal psychological sources for patterns of behavior that exhibit as phobias, or as a hinting at repressive societal norms which manifest in the development of compensatory phobic behaviors. My interest in fear and its outcomes lies away from the focus on the psychological and on the personal that is reflected here and in the media’s endless obsession with celebrity culture and personality politics. Far from an interest in how the implications of the individual will play out externally in the personality or in society, my fascination turns more on the ways that systems of regulation, deregulation, and of ideology work socially, politically, and economically to create fear in the individual. Perhaps the subtext we have in common is that we can only strengthen our ability to work out solutions to problems that have created fears by not avoiding them. And the possibility of transcending these fearful states through actual problem solving is the present we are able to give each other. We forgive ourselves when we look to the systemic problems as the culprit, and realize that they, far more than the individual, create fear in ourselves and abroad, and that power elites have everything to gain by pointing to the individual as the root of economic and social malaise.

— Cheryl Meeker, June 18, 2011

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CAPITALISM IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT - at the Waffle Shop, Pittsburgh

2011-06-14T10:56:00.000-07:00

Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It - billboard at The Waffle Shop

Cheryl Meeker: presentation at Shop Talk, SFMOMA

2011-05-08T21:02:00.000-07:00

Why Are We Having This Conversation? Financial Realities for Artists
By Cheryl Meeker
Shop Talk: Part Three - May 12, 2011
7:00pm Koret Visitor Education Center
SFMOMA, San Francisco

A lecture and visual presentation contextualizing the thesis of Shop Talk: Part Three, which considered "survival strategies artists develop and adopt to gain recognition and financial viability in tough economic times."

"Why Are We Having This Conversation?" addressed the landscape of economic, social, structural and creative realities that are acting upon the artist in the current financial collapse, positing that a better understanding of the place the artist holds in the existing power structure contributes to an improved platform from which to create art and live our lives.

Please contact Cheryl Meeker at cheryl@depletedselves.com if you are interested in a more expansive version of the presentation she made at SFMOMA for your group.

W.A.G.E. RECOGNIZES THAT ART IS WORK, AND THEREFOR SHOULD BE MONETARILY COMPENSATED.

Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) is a group of artists, art workers, performers and independent curators fighting to get paid for making the world more interesting. // www.wageforwork.com

recently posted: Doug Weir, ICBUW, "More Depleted" exhibition event, June 2010

2011-05-08T20:49:00.000-07:00

Doug Weir is the Coordinator for International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) based in the UK.
The following video interview with Doug Weir was conducted by Cheryl Meeker in the days prior to and screened during an event that took place in June 2010, as a part of "More Depleted", an exhibition at Gallery 1055, Diocesan House, San Francisco, CA. For more information about this show and the Depleted Selves project click here.

Cheryl's cover image for Gallery 16 book

2011-04-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

A new book from Gallery 16 -- cover image by Cheryl Meeker

emergency alert sound piece for Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It

2011-01-20T07:59:00.000-08:00

emergency alert + venetian bells remix: The test of San Francisco’s emergency outdoor alert system which is broadcast on public PA’s every Tuesday at noon has had new residents and visitors alarmed and long term San Franciscans alternately jerked to a state of orange alert or noting the fleeting weeks of their lives. Sampling, layering and manipulating the Tuesday alert test along with the ringing bells of the Venetian Basilica of San Marco in an audio mélange, Meeker contrasts or conflates the call to prayer or the call to awareness or alertness with the authoritative summons from a civic power apparatus. Meeker played the remix at noon in Union Square and at a CIO event, hoping to transform our weekly fight or flight response into bemusement.

Click here to play emergency alert + venetian bells remix

Market Fatigue

2010-08-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

Market Fatigue, Dan and Cheryl, August 4, 2010, Yerba Buena Gardens.

One work in the series Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It

For more about Dan and Cheryl's work click here

Photo credits: Ishan Clemenco and Carter
Roadie & technical assistance: Carter

Dan and Cheryl's Bumpersticker project

2010-08-04T15:28:00.000-07:00

This gallery of bummerstickers was created for Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It, by Dan and Cheryl