Investigative journalist Greg Palast and cartoonist Ted Rall have created an illustrative series called "Vote Theft for Idiots" that details how Bush and the Republicans will easily steal the upcoming US election in November, 2008. You can download various sizes of the first page here and at freeforall.tv you can watch the new film by Palast, "Free for All."

Wired has published an interview with Trevor Paglen, photographer and "experimental geographer", whose most recent work features a collection of 189 photos of officially non-existent spy satellites.

In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.

"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.

Image: Trevor Paglen, Lacrosse/Onyx IV Near Alfirk (USA 152, 48 x 60 inches, C-Print, 2008

Previously on Art Threat:
Follow spies in the skies with Terminal Air

Make sure you catch Paige Gratland's "Celebrity Lezbian Fist Launch" this Saturday June 21st from 1-3pm at Art Metropole, 788 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Mél Hogan for AT with Paige Gratland

[AT] Can you talk a bit about the story of Cynthia Plaster Caster, the inspiration for your project?

[PG] I saw a documentary made about her practice of casting rock and roller cock. When she started she was a art school student and rock and roll groupie who united those two interests in a project which gave her access to the people she admired. I identified with this aspect as my own projects and collaborations, free dance lessons, tit pin, burdensum, came out of an interest in connecting with a direct public. I was turned on by the strategy.

While visiting family in the fabled hamlet of Courtenay, British Columbia, I stumbled in to the Comox Valley Art Gallery and happened upon an incredibly arresting and uncompromising piece of political art. The framed work was entitled "North American Indian Prison" by George Littlechild. I was instantly taken by the vivid colours of the piece. Mesmerized by the ghostly archival photos enmeshed in a mixed media landscape of expert brush strokes of reds and yellows, and by its political stance, I immediately rushed to the front desk to inquire of this incredible artist whose work was nestled between the big box stores and car lots that now dominate the landscape of my once quieter, walkable town.

As it turns out, George Littlechild lays his head in the Comox Valley on the First Nations Reserve between Courtenay and K'ómoks. And so, eager as I was, I contacted him with a local prefix. The result is a short audio interview about his life, his work and his politics. Born in Alberta and of Plains Cree descent, Littlechild has established himself as one of Canada's prestigious contemporary artists combining traditional aboriginal with contemporary mixed media practices. His art interrogates history, memory and identity and forces those of us above the 49th parallel in North America to consider not only the collective pain of First Nations peoples that was hollowly addressed yesterday by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but to consider the lines that intersect between indigenous culture and that of the colonizer. In Littlechild's case, it is the familial and familiar–from both perspectives of his First Nations and European roots that are explored in his most recent work.

A visual artist, children's book creator, educator, activist and cultural hero for his bold but vulnerable resurrections of political and social histories, Littlechild is an artist whose work speaks loudly and truthfully. You can discover his work and read more about him at his personal site, GeorgeLittlechild.com.

Listen to the audio interview here.

When I was a smoker, the world was my ashtray. It's a philosophy on a short leash of intelligence (or, should I say, with short-sheeted intelligence). I don't smoke any more, but it looks like the world is still somebody's ashtray - actually, somebody's garbage dump. And this is what Delhi artist Vivan Sundaram forces us to reconsider in his new exhibition at the Chemould Prescott Road Gallery in Mumbai.

The exhibition (called Trash) is made up of sculpture, video and photographs. The huge digital prints (some as large as 60” x 40”) are of changing perspectives of a massive urban cityscape made of compressed and reconfigured garbage. Picture in your mind waste transformed into teetering skyscrapers, bridges, streets and parks, and old toothbrushes mangled into sickly palm trees.

Sundaram built the garbage cityscape in his studio a few years ago with the help of members of Delhi's waste-picker community (the waste-pickers were hired and the project coordinated through an NGO called Chintan that works to help waste-pickers gain rights). The photos capture the garbage-scape from a dizzying array of angles designed to both highlight the junkheap's at times remarkable simulacra of an urban landscape, and to playfully provoke. Take, for example, the digital print of skyscrapers of trash ornamented with a tiny Spiderman in mid-leap floating above the city ...

Once again, graffiti artist Banksy has aesthetically liberated a patch of cement in downtown London.

According to the Sydney Herald, Banksy created the image (of a child on a ladder and the message) on a post office wall in downtown London after constructing three stories of scaffolding and hiding the process with plastic tarps.

The whole event was a captured on closed circuit television (CCTV), but Banksy was not.

Who says cartoons are the only way to rile a religious flock?

Artist Alfred Hrdlicka, one of Austria's most celebrated painters, has caused a spasm of outrage among Christians with a painting in a recent exhibition. The painting in question is “Leonardo's Last Supper, restored by Pier Paolo Pasolini” which, in the artist's words, depicts the event as “a homosexual orgy”. Most surprising is the location of the exhibition -- the museum of Vienna's Roman Catholic Cathedral. The Catholic Church sponsored the show.

And this to me is the most remarkable part of the story: that the museum allowed the painting to be included in the show in the first place. It was only after numerous angry complaints by patrons that the painting was removed. Heroically (to my mind), the museum director Berhard Boehler and exhibition curator Martina Judt have defended the art work stating that the museum never intended to offend anyone and that art should be allowed to provoke debate.

Hrdlick'a controversial painting depicts the Apostles sprawling over the table and masturbating each other. In the museum where the painting has been removed, there is now a large blank black wall. But removal of the painting has not satisfied some Christians who have taken taken their howls of protest into the blogosphere. Conservative Christians around the world - in particular, in fundamentalist circles in the United States - have picked up the story and are demanding apologies.

Leonardo's Last Supper is not the only provocative image in the show...

We've all received them -- pleading emails from far away places offering big sums of money in broken English for the temporary use of our bank account. The situation is always urgent, and all we need do is give them details of our account and then sit back and watch the money roll in ... or so they say.

East German born Henning Wagaenbreth has assembled 36 of these scam emails and illustrated them as pop culture posters. The illustrations are chaotic and humorous renditions of the stories told in the scams. The illustrations have been assembled using woodblock, linocut and primitive typography.

The book is called Help, 36 Email Scams from Africa and is published by Gingko Press.

Wagenbreth is a visual artist and professor of visual communication at Universitat der Kunste in Berlin.

This sculpture of a white bear by Joshua Allen Harris captures lost energy from a New York subway grate, alternating between roadkill and resurrection.

Using this technique, one could craft some blow up buffoonery to make a statement during the US electoral race. Does anyone out there have any ideas for inflatable political fun?

Via Bunch of Monkeys.

Forgive my brevity, but another great book has hit the shelves of fine bookstores everywhere. Street Art and the War on Terror: How the World's Best Graffiti Artists Said No to the Iraq War by Eleanor Mathieson and Xavier Tapies, is full of amazing images and graphics from around the world, all of them offering commentary and confrontation to perhaps the most unpopular war ever launched.

From Revolution Books:

This fantastic book documents with dozens and dozens of color photos the explosion artistic expression of global opposition to the Bush regime’s “war on terror”.

Perhaps if they send us a copy I'll be able to offer more of a description and review...