Steve Staso's ULTRASECRETO book project.
by Jan Galligan
Santa Olaya, PR
November 20, 2012
Steve Staso calls himself an anti-artist and anti-filmmaker and says he is an anti-police. Born in Monroe, Michigan in the 1950's and raised in Detroit, he moved to New York City as a young man, where he always lived in one of the the Puerto Rican barrios. Staso was politicized at at early age, especially after reading The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord's seminal critique of contemporary society which argues that the life of contemporary society has been completely colonized and subsumed by consumerism. Debord writes, “Since art is dead, it has evidently become extremely easy to disguise police as artists... by the same process a cultural cover is guaranteed for every agent or auxiliary of the state’s networks of persuasion.”
For more than 30 years Staso has been creating films, drawings and paintings which explore and present the social political critique espoused by Debord. At the same time, Staso's exposure to the Puerto Rican diaspora had a strong effect on his art and politics, as he came to understand the plight of a people subjugated in their homeland and for many, forced to live and work “in the belly of the subjugating beast” in order to earn a respectable living for their families.
Read full article here:
CAPITULACIONES EXHIBIT BY DELANEY AND STASO
Article as published in En Rojo, cultural supplement to Claridad, the weekly national newspaper of Puerto Rico here: