Ravish the Republic

Download or read book Ravish the Republic written by Michael L. Berger and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2015-07-04 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Iron Garters are an "art gang" that masquerades, disseminates and performs as your archetypal "criminals," "outcasts" "mystics," "losers" and "lunatics": in short, a vital and necessary social surplus. Their antics have been traced back to Jean Genet's novel The Thief's Journal, the films of Kenneth Anger, as well as the Dada poems of Baroness Elsa and Hugo Ball. Yet still other Garters have been nourished on the Vienna Actionists, Genesis P-Orridge, Diamanda Galas, Gilles Deleuze, Samuel Delany, and the dulcet sounds of The Cramps. With a critical and aesthetic arsenal salvaged from underground "kulchurs" and academia's collective libido, the Iron Garters are not afraid to demand excitement along with analysis, frenzy coupled to resistance, and fashion inseparable from infiltration. Founded in San Francisco on a full moon night after a "deathpunk" show, the original members grew adversely impacted by the economic invasions reducing a once great city to a tepid monoculture. Fueled by queer, antinomian, heretical and radical traditions, the Garters pilgrimaged into various trans-continental sanctuaries and beachheads, leaving behind them radiant paper trails of provocation and sedition. This volume is one such radiant paper trail.Despite its many hiatuses, the Garters archive has grown more fertile, thanks in part to its endurance in imaginary/speculative realms. Currently, the Garters are remobilizing as a "crime art collective," with cells operating in cities most in need of "crime-art," while also re-asserting itself as an ongoing "transmedia" project. This present archive is a small fraction of the decade's worth of Garter experiments, epistles, stories and communiqués. In a political epoch when risk and anxiety seem to predicate our every move, and when being poor, different, "unskilled" or "a failure" (as judged by the demigods of Profit, Fear, Reason & Security) means that you are essentially criminalized, then it becomes imperative for art (wedded to theory and style) to celebrate its own "criminal," "dangerous" and "unassimiliable" nature. So let the Garters initiate you into the mysteries that are already yours, once you rid yourself of fear, anxiety and the need to be respectable.