Variant 21 Winter 2004

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Front cover: Paul Bommer
http://www.paulbommer.com

Editorial
A cultural complaint
Variant has been asked to account for itself by the Office of the Scottish Charities Register, following a complaint about the alleged ‘political’ nature of the magazine. Variant offers the following statement of our position:

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An Open Account of Variant
David Bellingham
Artist's page
Bellingham offers up a reading of Variant’s income and expenditure, from the minutiae of rolls of parcel tape to the often overlooked necessity of housing benefit.

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Extracting the Michael
Tom Jennings
This discussion of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 refuses simple distinctions between serious document and entertainment in assessing how the film can be seen as a wind-up. “Is Moore taking the piss, pissing in the wind, or just full of piss and wind?”

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http://www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Notes on Human Rights Watch
Macdonald Stainsby
Starting from a candid interpretation of its web offerings, Stainsby unveils HRW as an arrant apologist for imperialism in a long awaited discrediting of the human rights organisation’s alleged ideological autonomy. “The ideology of HRW ... is like the pane of glass you don’t see, but which really determines the appearance of what you are looking at.”

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The Case of Argentina
Recuperated Factories and the Multitude
Derek Merrill
The poster child of neo-liberalism, during the 1990s Argentina equated the peso to the dollar, privatized public resources while cutting social services; businesses profited mightily. In December 2001, the economy imploded. Merrill poses “...possible strategies of refusal and of production through the models Argentina has offered us to think about capitalism, social organization, and the recuperation of space.”

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Next on the Left or 'What good is a map if you know the way?'
Tim Stott
A testing of Bourriaud’s (co-director and curator, Palais de Tokyo, Paris and author of ‘Relational Aesthetics’) claims that topocritical art aims to “encourage a ‘democracy of viewpoints’, a polyculture of the imagination [in opposition to] the monoculture of information”, through a brief excursion into the histrory of Western European cartographic practice.

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On the Night Shift
From Lynndie England to Copper Green
Mike Small
“...the US has exempted itself from international war crimes, and acts as a rogue state with Blair and cohorts... What we have seen is the descent into barbarism... We need to learn real lessons from what happened in Iraq, about the collapse of legal structure, the impotence of parliament, the moral bankruptcy of the Labour government and the inadequacies of the anti-war movement...”

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"A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk
Along the briny beach"
Govanhill Baths Trust
An update of the developments in the forced closure of Govanhill Baths by Glasgow City Council against the express desires and needs of the community. Another under-reported episode in the ongoing neoliberal attack on public facilities and public space in the name of ‘regeneration’.

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Bad News from Israel
An expose of dishonest media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict
Jean Shaoul
A review of Glasgow University Media Group’s new book, a study which set out to empirically research the main TV news coverage in Britain of the Israel-Palestine conflict and in so doing exposed the dishonest role the media plays in distorting the conflict and misinforming the public.

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'Blair's Wars'
Phil England
England acknowledges Kampfner’s book “exposes the central folly at the heart of No. 10”, but goes much further in questioning and exposing, war-by-bloody-war, Kampfner’s factual, analytical and contextual omissions in Blair and his advisers taking the UK to war five times in six years. “It’s odd there’s barely a mention of the ‘O’ word in Kampfner’s book.”

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Supplement: Document 2
International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival