Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Van Thanh Rudd the 38 year old Vietnamese Australian artist whose artworks have created controversies due to their left-wing political content has contributed artworks in support of ‘Free the Refugees Campaign’. Rudd’s first step into art/politics was becoming a member of the Darebin Artists Action Group (DAAG), followed with a deeper involvement in global politics came about while attending anti-globalization S11 rallies in Melbourne. Rudd’s art is influenced, inspired and directed towards movements of social justice around the globe. His major aim is to expose his often controversial art to as many people as possible in order to inspire discussion and debate about art’s role in today’s environmental, political and economic crises. Rudd describes himself as an “anti-capitalist activist who believes art can help change the world for the better and that art is never neutral. Art is never devoid of politics and economics. Art is part of a class war between the wealthy, ruling elites of the world and the majority of the indebted, working poor and exhausted and depleting middle classes. …Along with many social justice activists around the world, am inspired by the revolutionary atmosphere taking place around the world, from the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall St, the radical Left movements of Latin America, to the local street protests. Those protests include freedom for refugees, freedom for Palestine, freedom for Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and ending the Imperialist wars in the middle east. My art attempts to assist these and many more social justice campaigns.”

Inspired by Van Thanh Rudd ow.ly/cEzj4 image source Facebook ow.ly/cEymh

They want to withdraw from the world (May 22nd 2012)

Anne Applebaum the 47 year old American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author has published an article on Slate titled ‘Europe’s Extremists on the March – Many of the parties winning across the continent have one thing in common: They want to withdraw from the world’. Applebaum states “…as I look across Europe I don’t know what to call the wave of discontent, as most of the parties on the outlying right or left have more in common with one another right now than they do with anyone in the center. Generally speaking they are anti-European, anti-globalization, and anti-immigration. Their leaders, in the words of a French friend, want to “withdraw from the world.” They don’t like their multiethnic capital cities or their open borders, and they don’t care for multinational companies or multilateral institutions. Above all, they are anti-austerity: They hate the budget cuts that they believe were imposed on their national governments by outsiders in the international bond market and by their own membership in the euro currency zone. Never mind that those same national governments had created the need for austerity by overspending and overborrowing, or in some cases—most notably Greece—by funding vast, unaffordable and corrupt state bureaucracies over many decades. And never mind that many of them had begged to be part of the euro zone—nobody was forced to join—or that they benefited for many years from being members.”

Inspired by Slate ow.ly/aWG8S image source ow.ly/aWG4L