Video: Glass Bead Collective, others sound alarm over pre-RNC crackdown

Artists, activists and journalists in Minneapolis held a press conference this morning decrying what they say is a trend: Local police targeting citizen journalists and artists in the weeks and days preceding the Republican National Convention. A police brutality watchdog was beaten by cops, he says, and his video camera was smashed. The members of the Glass Bead Collective were detained and their video gear confiscated, although no charges were filed. And a KSTP reporter was shoved into an elevator by police when he was trying to cover a sit-in at a HUD office. If this is law enforcement's RNC wind-up, what'll next week be like?

MnIndy has more.

So it begins: Pre-RNC, police confiscate artist/videographers' equipment

Without provocation, Minneapolis police recently confiscated the equipment and notes of three artist/journalists who are part of New York's Glass Bead Collective, a group that documents police misconduct, legal protest activities, and the phenomenon of political conventions. Two MPD squads and a sheriff's car stopped the trio and seized their belongings without consent, taking cameras, computers and notes. No charges were filed and the three were released, but without their gear. The UpTake has must-see video of a press event with the three artists -- Vlad Teichberg, Olivia Katz and Anita Braithwaite -- and their lawyer, Minneapolis' top civil-liberties attorney, Bruce Nestor. Please spread the word!

More on the police crackdown on photographers, artists and journalists.

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Bits: 10.07.10

Chiharu Shiota, Room of Memory, installed at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, 2009 [via ABB]

• On Wednesday, Kathleen Folden walked into the Loveland, Colo., art museum and started bashing a plexiglas vitrine with a crowbar and then tore up Stanford professor Enrique Chagoya's The Misadventures of Romantic Cannibals. The 56-year old is in custody on a charge of criminal mischief, a Class 4 felony with a fine of up to $2,000, after damaging the editioned lithograph, which shows Jesus in sexual situations.

• More art outrage: Gil Vicente's charcoal drawings of the artist with a pistol pressed to the temples of world leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, George W. Bush and the pope at the Bienal São Paulo prompted the Brazilian Bar Association to call for the removal of the series. "Even though a work of art freely expresses the creativity of its maker, without limits, there have to be limits to exhibiting it publicly." (Thanks, Stephan.)

• Video: Artist Steve Lambert on "why it's important that public funds support artwork that might be considered offensive."

• Flickr groups I like: Handpainted Signs of the World and Folk Typography.

• Artists, including the Glass Bead Collective, are rallying on behalf of the so-called "Ground Zero mosque," an Islamic center that will also house arts facilities, including studios.

• Depressing fact of the day: "Of the 6,909 known languages, about half are expected to disappear in this century; every two weeks, the last fluent speaker of a language dies." Via @thenassassin.

Video: Policing in the age of YouTube

An outtake from my MnIndy video, this piece features Glass Bead Collective member Vlad Teichberg discussing a cultural tipping point: we're at a point when law enforcement heading to events like the RNC protests are facing off with citizens armed with camcorders and cellphone cams. One false move and they could be outed on YouTube.

Bits: 10.06.09

Christian Marclay's 2822 Records (PS1), 1987-2009, by Riviera 2005, Flickr

• Online documentary by the Glass Bead Collective and Twin Cities, Chicago and Pittsburgh Indymedia: Democracy 101: Pittsburgh G20 Protests and the Police Occupation of Pitt University

• Introducing “Hi, How Are You,” an iPhone app/game by outsider artist musician Daniel Johnston, who has never owned a cellphone. (Via ArtInfo.)

• On my to-see list, thanks to Kemi at Creative Capital: The Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska. Don't miss the Sculpture Prairie or, on the weekend of Oct. 24, the Art Harvest.

• Nicholas Kristof: "The most successful logo in human history is not the Nike swoosh or any other corporate design. Instead, it’s probably one designed by anti-slavery activists in Britain way back in 1787, and it became a mainstay of the abolitionist movement — a way to spread the word and build solidarity. This logo was provided by Josiah Wedgewood for use by early British abolitionists.... It shows a slave in chains and asks: 'Am I not a man and a brother?'"

• SocialDesignZine's site is now censored in Iran for this gallery of 132 "Posters for Green Iran."

• Onion headline: "Struggling Museum Now Allowing Patrons To Touch Paintings"

• Insert Spinal Tap joke here: Mini-Stonehenge discovered in England.

• Among the winners of the 2009 IgNobel Prizes -- "a bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander."