About Clancco
Clandestine Construction Company International (Clancco), a corporation founded in 1968 and based out of New York, is an interdisciplinary project which explores, investigates, and examines the relationship between art and law through architectural-sculptures, performances, writings, interviews, and an internet website/blog, all made available in different material and digital formats.
Clancco’s project is unique because it operates as a corporation, enabling Clancco to have multiple, diverse, and yet co-existing practices (subsidiaries) across the United States and abroad.
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Radio Red ☼ Black Ink
"Only Women Bleed"
Clancco || 6 August 2008 || (0)
From the CBC:
One of the judges of Australia's top religious art competition has resigned in vehement objection to a work that has been included in the finalists' short list. Australian art critic and historian Christopher Allen resigned from the panel of judges after Adam Cullen's triptych Corpus Christi made the short list for the $20,000 Blake Prize for Religious Art. Corpus Christi depicts Jesus on the cross with the inscription, "Only women bleed," a line from a song by rocker Alice Cooper.
No offense, but the statement at issue seems more pro-woman than anti. Simply put, in Nietzschean terms, this would make women "human, all too human." Why not go with Cooper's "The One That Got Away," "Your Feminine Side," or better yet, "Killed By Love"?
Damien Hirst Buys Fake Sex...Pistols!
Clancco || 4 August 2008 || (0)
According to The Independent, it seems that Damien Hirst is a bit pissed off that he has bought what seems to be fake Sex Pistols paraphernalia.
It all started when Hirst, also a collector of contemporary art, bought bagfuls of punk clothing from [Simon] Easton's Punk Pistol website for around £80,000. Hirst believed the clothes, said to include the famous God Save the Queen T-shirt, were originals from the 1975-79 period when [Malcolm] McLaren, [ex-Sex Pistols manager] and his then partner, Vivienne Westwood, handmade them for sale in their King's Road shop, Sex, which later became Seditionaries. McLaren is said to have taken one look at Hirst's collection and condemned them as forgeries.
It gets better. McLaren has written an introduction to Easton's book, called Sex and Seditionaries, of images based on Sex and Seditionaries clothing, which McLaren claims contains the items sold to Hirst, and which is already published as a limited edition in the UK and is for sale on Amazon for £300.
Now McLaren is attempting to stop a Rizzoli publishing firm from printing Easton's book. In a letter to Rizzoli, McLaren threatened legal action: "If you go ahead, I insist first of all that you withdraw my name and my essay from the book. Mr Easton does not have the right to use this essay beyond the self-published limited edition. If I do not hear back from close of Tuesday next I shall have no alternative but to gain legal advice."
Google: "There's No Such Thing As Privacy"
Clancco || 1 August 2008 || (0)
After getting sued by a Pennsylvania couple for invasion of privacy, Google replied that in today's day and age, there can be no expectation of privacy (even though the couple's house is located on a private road "clearly marked as private property"). "Today's satellite image technology means that even in today's desert, complete privacy does not exist," says Google.
Perhaps in light of this remarkably stupid remark, NewScientistTech reports that "Google has begun obscuring the faces of people in its Street View service, which lets users of Google Maps zoom in to view street level images. But the images look decidedly odd, with whole streets peopled by blurred faces." Columbia University's CAVE Project has developed "software [that] randomly selects 33,000 photos of faces from picture-sharing sites like Flickr.com, then picks the most suitable faces for each person in shot. Only the eyes, nose and mouth are used, resulting in a composite image of the two people. 'It matches subject pose, lighting conditions and image resolution,' says Neeraj Kumar [of the CAVE Project]. 'The selected faces are aligned to common 3D coordinates, corrected for colour and lighting, and blended into the target image.'
Other uses: "Aside from Street View, the system could be used to obscure the faces of military personnel or eyewitnesses to crime." Check out a couple of fucked-up examples here (including a better version of Denzel Washington).
The Taking of Caravaggio
Clancco || 1 August 2008 || (0)
El País reports today that Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ (or the Kiss of Judas if you prefer, circa late 16th Century), was stolen from the Ukraine's Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art. According to this report, the thieves entered the museum after breaking a second-floor window, and then helping themselves to this gem. The museum is currently closed while police use K-9's to sniff out clues. More here (in español of course).
"Stupid Bitch to Attend Law School"
Clancco || 31 July 2008 || (0)
If you think you can write the headline above anonymously on a webforum and get away with it, think again. From our Nation's most liberal law school comes a lawsuit (and a judicial order) allowing the lawyers of two plaintiffs in a defamation case to force Internet Service Providers and webmail providers to release the names of anonymous posters.
According to an article in Wired.com, some anonymous posters also posted, "Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped.":
Those are the words of "AK-47" -- a poster to the college-admissions web forum AutoAdmit.com. AK-47 was one of a handful of students heaping misogynist scorn on women attending the nations' top law schools in 2007, in posts so vile they spurred a national debate on the limits of online anonymity, and an unprecedented federal lawsuit aimed at unmasking and punishing the posters.
Here's the interesting part:
Now lawyers for two female Yale Law School students have ascertained AK-47's real identity, along with the identities of other AutoAdmit posters, who all now face the likely publication of their names in court records -- potentially marking a death sentence for the comment trolls' budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial. [bolding ours]
A federal judge ruled in January that the attorneys could serve subpoenas on ISPs and webmail providers. Using that power, the lawyers have unmasked some -- though not all -- of the AutoAdmit posters.
Now they're asking the judge to give them additional time to try and determine the identities of the remaining defendants, who are currently being sued under their AutoAdmit handles: among others, PaulieWalnuts, Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey, The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah, Patrick Bateman and HitlerHitlerHitler.
One other thing. The two attorneys (this one and this one) representing the two female plaintiffs have been sued by one of the AutoAdmit administrators for abuse of the judicial process. Stupid Clancco posting stupid entries.
Barbie Beats Up On The Bratz! (UPDATED)
Clancco || 28 July 2008 || (0)
If there was ever a need for a clear work-for-hire agreement, it was here. Barbie has just won a major lawsuit against the Bratz. We covered this story not too long ago, but here's the result, from the WSJ and the BBC.
WSJ: Mattel Inc. and its iconic Barbie doll won a fierce legal battle Thursday when a federal jury in Riverside, Calif., found that rival MGA Entertainment Inc.'s popular Bratz dolls, which have undercut Barbie sales in recent years, were conceived while their designer was employed by Mattel.
BBC: It means that Mattel could be awarded millions of dollars when the jury comes to consider damages. MGA Entertainment could even be stopped from selling the popular large-headed, multi-ethnic, urban fashion dolls. Mattel had claimed that the name and design of Bratz dolls were based on drawings done by Carter Bryant while he was under a contract that entitled the world's biggest toymaker to his designs.
We're kicking ourselves for not having bought Mattel stock!
UPDATE: July 28, 2008:
Thanks to some racially insensitive comments, a juror from this case was removed last week. The Bratz have now asked for a mistrial claiming these insensitive comments sparked and spearheaded the decision against the Bratz. Specifically, the juror made slurs about the ethnicity of Isaac Larian, the Jewish, Iranian-born CEO of MGA, maker of Bratz.
From today's WSJ:
A few more details emerged over the weekend: According to the LA Times, a court order said the juror remarks characterized Iranians as "stubborn, rude" and as "thieves" who have "stolen other person's ideas." The remarks were made during deliberations in the first phase of the trial that found Larian had aided a Mattel Barbie designer, Carter Bryant, who created the Bratz concept in violation of his Mattel contract.
MGA (the loser and "owner" of the Bratz) asked that the court declare a mistrial, wiping out Mattel's victory. The motion will be heard when court reconvenes Aug. 4. More here.
"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth -- it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." -- Ecclesiastes
Walter Martin: Contemporary Witness to Historic Patent Drawings
"Intellectual Property: A Chronology Compendium of Intersections between Contemporary Art and Utility Patents," by Robert Thill, was first published in Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Science and Technology 37, no. 2 (2004), pp. 117-124. An expanded, adapted version of it is published here in serial form with the abstract, introduction, and summary extracted. Starting on March 10, 2008, a different project in the compendium will appear biweekly. Please note that each entry is a unique electronic publication and will not be stored in an online archive after the two-week publication period. Below is the eleventh entry of this series (published here on July 28, 2008).
Continue reading "Walter Martin: Contemporary Witness to Historic Patent Drawings" »
Sonar
Structures in Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left
Clancco recently published an essay expanding on its ongoing project, Structures. This essay is available via PDF format in the recent issue of Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left. In Structures, Clancco explores alternative exhibition spaces in which to analyze real and intellectual property laws by finding private and public property locations across the United States—unaffiliated with any art institution—and installs structures on these sites, at times with consent of the landowner, at other times without.
In this essay Clancco also explores the relationship between the readymade, the corporate entity, and so-called outlaw practices, particularly through the historical practices of urban squatters, Native American contestations of land, Rosa Parks, as well as the art historical art practices of Blinky Palermo, Michael Asher, and Gordon Matta-Clark. The provisional conclusion arrived at in this essay is the beginning of an investigation which must analyze the incremental proprietary element in the owning of aesthetic experiences.
Iron Fists: The Insidious Side of Brand Loyalty
Today, presidential candidates, cities and colleges have joined toothpastes and soft drinks in the battle for "brand loyalty." Steven Heller's Iron Fists makes a sophisticated and visually arresting comparison between modern corporate-branding strategies - slogans, mascots, jingles and the rest - and those adopted by "four of the most destructive 20th-century totalitarian regimes": Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, and Mao's China. As he pursues his four "case studies," Heller, by means of unsettling images and shrewd analysis, amply restores the vileness to branding.
My Favorite Justice
Who is your favorite (or least) U.S. Supreme Court Justice? Aesthetics or politics, strict interpretation or living constitution, Warren, Rhenquist, or Roberts Court, we'd love to hear about it? Email: architect[at]clancco[dot]com and tell us which one(s), and why. We'll publish an overview of our reader responses (with your permission of course), including those of Clancco staff and interns.
Satellite
Law + Visual Culture
Echoes
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