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Room name: Four Beams
Description: Your place of rest is literally knotted to four large ceiling rafters with thick shipping rope. The bed suspended one and a half metres from above can only be reached with a vertical ladder. Climb, climb! Unfortuntately, security regulations bar this room from being rented out to overweight guests!
The Propellor Island City Lodge calls itself an "art" hotel, but could easily rechristen itself a phobia recovery clinic. (Link via Geisha Asobi and Boing Boing)
Among the 2004 Whitney Biennial’s least successful entries was a room-cum-scrapbook by Raymond Pettibon. Photographs and drawings were pin-tacked to the wall, and intentionally faux-deep statements (“here is another system of philosophy”) were drawn across the walls in a sloppy but self-conscious diary-style cursive.
Much of the Biennial, my first, felt to me like a scrapbook that had replaced pages for walls. I mean this as a compliment, despite my dislike for Pettibon’s work. There was an appealing casualness to the Biennial’s presentation, 108 artists parsed into small white rooms; the exhibit felt intimate, surprising given its scope. And I strolled through the rooms, prompted by the metaphor of a scrapbook, looking for my own memories— uncanny recognitions and unapologetic hits of nostalgia.
The best work felt dreamy, familiar but strange. Eve Sussman’s film, 89 Seconds at Alcazar, unfreezes Velázquez’s Las Meninas. We watch as its characters, the queen, the dwarf, the Infanta Dona Margarita, assemble, and the camera floats lazily between them and then to Velázquez. “Sometimes, they are talking, but what we hear is like the murmur of voices from another room,” Mark Stevens writes for New York Magazine. “The work is uncanny. The characters have stepped out of art into art, our art.”
What follows is a shortlist of “my” art, the Biennial entries that exist in a scrapbook I compose in my dreams and lose upon waking.
Click on images for close-ups.
1. Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water
In the NY Times, Michael Kimmelman writes, "Beauty is the biennial's ultimate defense against naysayers, notwithstanding that it is in the eye of the beholder. My vote for show-stopper is Yayoi Kusama's mirrored room of colored lights and water, which should cause people to line up for a peek."
Mia Fineman writes for Slate, "[Kusama's] room-sized work, Fireflies on the Water, accommodates only one viewer at a time, but this hallucinatory installation of mirrors and sparkly lights reflected to infinity is worth the wait."
The work conflates vanity and beauty; yes, it's beautiful, but you're embedded in its center, as its audience and subject. And then, the vanity it prompts surpasses a simple consideration of yourself, rendered beautiful -- your lone figure stranded on a filmic dock, surrounded by colored lights and their reflections -- and becomes the vanity implicit to any appreciation of art. Beauty exists for us, relies on us for its transcendence from the physical to immaterial. In acknowledging the magical beauty of Fireflies on the Water, we're also, very simply, asked to acknowledge the deeper magic of subjectivity.
2. Cecily Brown, Black Painting 4
In The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl writes, "I can’t decide if established, estimable painters and drafters like Brown, Sillman, Siena, and Pettibon have abruptly improved or if the new authority of their work mirrors the Zeitgeist. In the case of Brown’s sexy Expressionism—nudes in bed, oppressed by darkling atmospheres that are pregnant with demonic intimations—both possibilities seem likely."
Black Painting 4, oil on linen, displays a nude on sheets, above whom blackness -- thick, messy and chaotic -- begins to explode into something else, something darker than blackness. Oscillating between abstraction and a more figurative style, the painting implies both the flesh and grace of the woman's body and the frightening, unfocused quality of dreaming.
3. Amy Cutler, gauches on paper
Fineman writes, "Amy Cutler, whose early work often seemed dry and didactic, is represented here by weird, charming drawings of a fairy-tale world populated by women who turn their dresses into pup tents and carry horses strapped into harnesses on their backs."
Cutler's drawings display an idiomatic intelligence that, when paired with a feminist sense of humor, results in dark, quirky fairy-tales. In one drawing, the phrase "horseback" is parsed into women carrying horses like backpacks. Another drawing, Rations is, according to the Whitney website, a play on the saying "to cut off one's nose to spite one's face." For me, Cutler's work summarized the quirky and unpretentious aspects of the Biennial.
4. Ernesto Caivano, series of ink drawings
From The Globe and Mail's Whitney review: "Fantasy sparkles… in Ernesto Caivano's fanatically detailed drawings of imaginary Philapone birds."
Similarly, Fineman writes, "Ernesto Caivano … renders imaginary creatures called Philapores—flightless birds with elaborate plumage—with a fluid, meticulous line and extraordinary technical finesse."
There's not much more to say about Caivano. His images are beatiful in the way a mathematical equation might be: as coherent as it is intricate, as simple as it is precise.
5. Elzabeth Peyton, Nick (La Luncheonette, December 2002) and Live to Ride (E.P.)
Schjeldahl says, "As for Peyton, the distilled allure of her little pictures makes them, for me, the moral center of the Biennial. Her romantic aestheticism charges her swift line and intense color with a sense of the sacred."
Nick (La Luncheonette, December 2002), awash in a night club blue, is better seen in person. It feels like a still frame from a film: a moment that implies a full night's activity. The paint strokes are long, wispy at their edges, suggesting a moment's transcience. But the colors, primary blues, reds, and yellows, anchor the moment and give it a convincing physicality.
6. Terence Koh, The Whole Family (Bigger)
The catalog notes call The Whole Family "contemporary memento mori," "a blizzard of white, a color signifying death in non-Western cultures." White faux fur pelts, hiding random objects, cover the cubicle-sized installation. Pulling back a pelt, you look into a room coated in "powdery white cornstarch" (catalog notes). White objects are scattered throughout: dangling from the top, a miniature ladder; farther back, an upside-down owl with oversized diamond eyes. The Whole Family feels a little slight, but its blankness was convincingly chilly -- a calm that registers as threatening.
Other highlights:
-Catherine Opie, Untitled (Surfers)
-Sue de Beer, Hans und Grete
-Marina Abramovic, Count On Us
-Mark Handforth, Western Sun and Diamond Brite
-Jim Hodges, Untitled (it's already happened)
-Craigie Horsefield, El Hierro
Far Side cartoons made real (via J-Walk).
The rules of this game are thus: You are to use choose any Far Side cartoon and remake it as a real image. Extra points will be awarded to those who don't use a past cartoon, but choose to go the original route, making an entirely new joke up, but in Gary Larson's signature style.
Caption: Murry didn't feel the first signs of panic untill he pulled the emergency cord.
The Guardian and Modern Painters have teamed up to put on a contest for the best unpublished art criticism. In Saturday's Guardian, contest judge and art critic Charles Saumarez Smith discusses what he's looking for, "good writing in what might be described as the middle ground":
Scholars in art history are not encouraged to go into general practice and to speculate on subjects outside their specialist area of intellectual competence. Nor is there very much by way of general writing by academics in newspapers and magazines - apart, perhaps, from those intellectuals, such as Julian Stallabrass, who write about contemporary art…I'm not sure the contest is open to Americans, but since the rules don't state otherwise, I plan to enter. Writing art criticism is, in my opinion, as satisfying as writing fiction. To the extent that art criticism has a more circumscribed subject, it better encourages exactness -- a more precise translation of experience into language -- and is wonderful training for any writer.…At the other end of the scale, there is a great deal of lively reviewing of art exhibitions by critics who write week after week for the national newspapers. The convention of newspaper reviewing in this country is well established and correspondingly restricted in terms of length and scope.
It is a medium that is not intended to encourage discursive reflection. There are reviewers I admire - thoughtful, intelligent and well-qualified practitioners of the genre who have the essential characteristic of not being entirely predictable in what they write. But the requirement of their work is to provide a highly contingent record of a particular exhibition, no more.
Is there is a paucity of good writing, then, in this middle ground? Am I the only person who recollects long and thoughtful articles by writers such as Kenneth Clark and Michael Ayrton, which were published in the Listener and which I was able to read in the school library?
They encouraged me to look at and think about art, not just as a medium of contemporary fashion, but as one that required careful critical judgment - the use of intelligent language to describe the thoughts and feelings inspired by a particular work.
The contest has no cash prize, but the winners will have their work published in the Guardian and Modern Painters. The deadline for entry is June 30, and, happily, entries can be sent in via email (prize@modernpainters.co.u).
"Find the strip you've been looking for all this time! Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's is proud to present the Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search: C.H.E.S.S.! The database contains all 3150 Calvin and Hobbes strips published with complete references to the books and pages they're published on."
From Tuberculosis posters. Link via Tom McMahon.
It makes me so happy when my favorite artists or writers collaborate on books. Edward Carey, my workshop teacher last semester, is about to start work on a small book with Shelley Jackson about tumors or illnesses or something else macabre enough for them. Both Carey and Jackson, btw, draw and write; Carey does both professionally.
Tonight I discovered another exciting, though no longer timely, collaboration: author Ben Marcus wrote a story to accompany photographs from Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick's Transmissions from the Schottensumpftünftig (Scotlandfuturebog), an exhibit I loved (and reviewed; see below).
If you're interested in a brief introduction to Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick's work, I've compiled some photographs from recent exhibits, along with an excerpt from my review of Transmissions.
From City of Salt:
From Transmissions from the Schottensumpftünftig (Scolandfuturebog):
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(From my review of False Witness, published Feb. 7, 2001 in the College Hill Independent:)
…False Witness showcases the work of both Joan Fontcuberta’s Sputnik exhibit and Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick’s Transmissions from the Schottensumpftünftig (Scolandfuturebog). Fontcuberta’s work is the less aesthetically appealing—and the museum placard seems to apologize for it by lauding it as False Witness’s left-hemisphere, its cerebral half…
…And yet, hanging in between art works, are Kahn and Selesnick’s textual explanations of the show. The Schottensumpftünftig is a post-apocalyptic world, populated only by illiterate bogdwellers. The documents of the bogdwellers’ existence, hanging in the Winton Bell Gallery, have been transmitted to us from the Schottensumpftünftig through a strange Platonic wormhole. “If an object in their world becomes slightly loosened from the universal truth it represents due to the forces at play in the great whirlpool of time, it falls into our world—and, conversely, when we create objects, thoughts, or sounds that are too perfectly expressed, they disappear from our own world and appear in theirs.”
According to the text, the Schottensumpftünftig is a world without language, in which “each object symbolizes nothing but itself, and is also the ultimate expression of itself.” In calling this show postmodernist, we fight against the artists’ textual explanation of Platonic forms and full presence.
The art, however, is an elegant mediator. On one hand, it seems immersed in a visual language. Zeltritus (Tentrties) expressly cites Quattrocento painting: the soft rendering of human flesh and the fluid grouping of bodies in Botticelli’s Primavera; and the more static body and severe geometry of Pierro della Francesca’s The Annunciation. Meanwhile, Pfingsthlrad (Pfingsthlwheel), featuring a generic male figure trapped inside a thorny wheel, overtly references art of Christ.
But the art’s materiality, with its pretense of non-materiality, erases the sense of repetition necessary for language. Iris-printed on rice paper, the works wrinkle like bed sheets—bed sheets that have just been slept in, and are left with the residue of dreams. A couple moments after waking, the dream, the image, will vanish; it will rush back to the (symbolic) unconscious.
more online resources:
-photographs from exhibitions
-text from exhibitions
-look inside the book
BT: …OK. What's next?LT: No specific plans yet. I tend to work impulsively. I would like to make a short film documenting the life and assassination of Trotsky using the Smurfs.
Cameron Davidson, via dublog
Ray Caesar, via cipango
Patrick Shanahan, via Conscientious
From the BBC: "The Andy Warhol Authentication Board has decreed that only artworks the artist was directly involved in producing can be considered a Warhol original, according to reports in the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph in the UK."
Baudrillard on Warhol: "Modern art had already gone a very long way in the deconstruction of its object, but it was Warhol who went furthest in the deconstruction of the subject of art, in the destruction of the artist. It was he who went furthest in the disinvestment of the creative act. One could say that this is his snobbery, but a snobbery that relieves us of all the affectation of art -- precisely because he is machinic."
Later in Baudrillard's The Plastic Inevitable: "Behind this machinic snobbery, what actually is happening is a rise in power, a potentialization of the object, image, sign and simulacrum. A rise in power of value, for which the finest example is the art market itself. In this market sphere we are far from the alienation of the price, which is still a real measure of things. We are in the fetishism of value, which explodes the very notion of the market and in the same blow destroys the work of art as such. He works towards the extermination of the real by the image, by such an overbidding of the image that it puts an end to all aesthetic value. In this sense it is impossible to say, like H. Obalk, that Warhol is not a great artist. Fortunately, he's not an artist at all. Quite the contrary: at stake in his work is an anthropological challenge to the very notion of art and aesthetics."
Later in the BBC piece: "The collectors believe the board are deliberately refusing to verify the works in an attempt to keep prices high, reports the Telegraph."
And from Andy Warhol: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."
And a bit of trivia: After Warhol died of heart failure in 1987, Sotheby's auctioned a Warhol android prototype that Warhol was developing to appear in his place on TV talk shows.
"Photographic paper is exposed to a range of everyday objects and rituals, recording passages of time rather than moments."
links found at beverly tang
Axel Erlandson: living tree sculptures
found at caterina
1. John Leigh's Karborn.com
2. Insect Tectonics
3. Karen Ingham, Anatomy Lessons
4. The New Anatomists
5. A nice depiction of wrist-slitting
6. Laura Letinsky's Morning, and Melancholia series. I first saw #15 two years ago.
7. Astronomy Quilt
8. Robert and Shana Parkeharrison
9. Alex Kanevsky (K.B. in movement, left)
10. weblog, pallalink
11. When I was young, I loved Edmund Dulac.
12. Forensic Art
13. more Hans Bellmer than before
14. Vojislav Jakic's Art Brut
15. Olafur Eliasson; The Weather Project is currently at the Tate Modern
16. Jörg Sasse
1 via fishbucket; 2 via solipsistic ; 6 via 990000; 7 via plep; 8 via esthet; 9 via Conscientious; 11 via cipango; 12 via plep; 13 via gmtPlus9; 14 via gmtPlus9; 16 via solipsistic via things
1. From a Publishers Lunch email: "Authors Guild dues are $90 for the first year and follow a sliding scale after that based on your writing income (most members continue to pay $90 per year)." Oooh. Sad.
2. I signed up withmyspace.com to see how it compares to Friendster. Seems like it has more features, but is also more cheesy. Profiles require taglines; I hate taglines.
3. I'd sort of like to write an interview or article on "Vera Little" (pseudonym). From one of her many sites: "I am a multimedia designer, animator, and a doll-maker. I am a finger and leg amputee. I have an affinity for oddities and a tendency to accumulate things. I live with Max in an old factory in Boston." Some "Vera Little" places to go to: News, Leg Journal (very interesting), Animation, Links, Live Journal.
Wim Delvoye, whose art I've linked to twice before, has turned his sex-rays into church-style stained glass windows. Conscientious is not impressed.
From left to right, the work of Connie Smith, Marie E.V.B. Gibbons, Cara Moczygemba, and M. Elisabeth Higgins O'Connor. More artists with unwieldy names and art at The Figurative Gallery of Contemporary Art.
I've linked to sensitive light's previous photos of smoke, but now he's added color.
And, also, a couple smoke photos I missed.
almost related: The Bizarre World of Candy Cigarettes
The painted photography of Yang Shaobin.
link via cipango
Eldon Garnet's photography, sick and slick.
I've been thinking recently about recent literature's treatment of the grotesque, but maybe some of my thoughts can also be applied to the visual arts:
The grotesque is always sensual, physical; it's a subject matter which, while evoking emotion, reintroduces formalism, calling attention to composition, color, shape, and line. It could be argued that, if an emotional state (disgust, fear, other components of the grotesque) can produce formalism, formalism's detatchment from content slides into irony. But, instead, I think what we're seeing is a reappraisal of the grotesque as something which, on the surface repulses and makes us look away, but, also fascinates, engages, and makes us look closer; Garnet's photographs -- glossy, colorful -- are formally attractive. The grotesque's ability to produce fascination has always been its hidden structure, but art like Garnet's is trying to bring that fascination to the surface.
I found Eldon Garnet's site, by the way, at Conscientious, a consistently excellent photography blog. In the past week, I've also been thankful for his links to Matthias Hoch, Renze Dijkema, and Peter Bialobrzeski.
Unusual X-Rays. Galleries include: objects, paintings, emergency room visits, mummies, reptiles and more.
See similar posts.
Pixelman's drawn-over photos.
"Unlike many who use the computer to make a layered image, [Lucien] Clergue makes his double exposures in-camera … One image is contemporary, of a nude or the bullfight. The other is a photograph made in a museum of a detail from a pre-nineteenth century painting."
via conscientious
more optical illusions.
The illustration (above) isn't a particularly good example of the genre; usually the brain clicks back and forth between two visual interpretations, but here, the double-image merges into one, women and skull. It's that failure that made me post this picture; the optical illusion seems to fail on purpose, because artists with the most simplistic message are often the most insistent. Vanity is the flip-side--the optical illusion--of an unstated and lonesome fixation on mortality. It's banally morbid, but has an emotional effect on me; I don't know why.
The Optical Illusion Exhibition, by the way, is only one of many exhibitions at the Neuroscience Art Gallery, which I found by reading Lee W. Potts' The Eyes Have It.
From a Douglas Coupland interview in The Morning News:
Sometimes I’ll start collecting something and I don’t even know why I am collecting it but I have to. I collected about fifty high school yearbooks from 1980 to 2000. This is before I began work on Hey Nostradamus! Everyone is saying to me, ‘Are you fucking nuts?’ But then I got a phone call from the French government where they have this program where they have French artists do interdisciplinary projects and this guy Pierre Huyghe (even the French aren’t sure how to pronounce it) said I have been important to his work. He came over, and the French find high school a very exotic concept. Cheerleaders to them are like Corrines at the Moulin Rouge would be to us. So we ended up with 47 of these books. We pull out the Exacto, scissors, tape, and found images that had some kind of resonance to them and all we knew was that the images had a power to them, a potency. And then we put together subjective categories – not jocks, nerds – and all these hidden structures emerged. For example, almost every yearbook has a shot where the third best-looking girl in the school is kind of looking around frightened, like a Cindy Sherman photo. And it was so universal. Then we realized there is one nerd in the camera club and then you put them all together and you have this gallery of fear. And then every yearbook has at least one or two people asleep at their desk. But if you assemble them together it seems like a biohazard or bioterror. And there is this other category with the biology teacher holding the skeleton.
Designers' business cards.
link via injection
some other business card links:
-business cards for jobs you don't have but should
-International Business Card Collectors, and more links like that (see right-hand column)
-the history of the business card
I rarely post journals, in part because I assume people come here for the links, and I don't want finding those links to be like wading through a private sewer in a PVC suit and galoshes.
But, today's the first day of the new schoolyear, always a day of news. So here's some life updates, with many links thrown in the sewage:
-I've already skipped around my apartment twice. I got into Edward Carey's fiction workshop. Link goes to Edward Carey's thoughts on being both an artist and a writer. Here's another link, an interview, in which the interviewer asks, "Is there something about downtrodden, socially rejected, and supremely bizarre people that invites your observation and veneration?" I wanted to get into Carey's workshop because his answer, of course, is yes. Or, to quote in full:
Yes, they stand apart from the world and look at it in an entirely different way; sometimes they complicate life, and sometimes they simplify it. They just have a very different way of doing things, and the more different they do something the more they make you think about the ordinary way of doing it—and to consider it in a fresh light. I can remember reading a truly wonderful essay by Diane Arbus, in which she discusses those people that stand apart from everyone else, and being painfully moved by it. I haven't forgotten it, or her astonishing photographs.
-As my students know, I'm not a very responsible teacher; I take too long getting back students' assignments. My MFA program, with a logic so perverse it could only come from writers, recently rewarded this irresponsibility by putting me on scholarship; I no longer have to teach for money, and if I'm not teaching I can't screw up as a teacher.
-Some of the authors giving readings this semester: Dave Eggers, Annie Proulx, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Letham, and, oh joy, yes, yes, Lorrie Moore. The oh joy, yes, yes, means I'm excited.
Yet another artist I want for the cover of my unwritten novel.
-a slideshow tour of Gothic and Supernatural Motifs. (via the Cartoonist)
-Joyce Carol Oates on the American Gothic (scroll down)
-a gallery of vamps from history, folklore, and film
-paintings and photographs related to scenes and settings from Bram Stoker's Dracula. (via the Cartoonist)
-Vampires don't have to suck blood to be vampires. They can just like sleeping in late. "Physically, vampires are usually 'night people' on a biochemical level. They have inverted circadian rhythms, with body cycles such as temperature peaks, menstrual onset, and the production of sleep hormones in the brain occurring at the opposite time of day from most people. They have difficulty adjusting to daytime schedules and frequently work nights. They tend to be photosensitive, avoiding sunlight, sunburning easily, and having excellent night vision. Their vitality ranges widely, and they can be vigorous and active one day, depressed and languorous the next." [more>]
-support site for vampires
The Art of Laura Splan
I frequently use medical science and technology as a point of departure to question categories of what is natural, what is normal, and what is desirable. I am interested in the social implications of these categorizations and the hierarchical structures they create.
link via two-zero
Sally Gall's subterranean photography, via indigoblog
Physical Computing: A Hands On How To Guide for Artists
Did you ever want to get more physical with your computer? Maybe you wanted a person's movement or light or heat to trigger something like a Quicktime movie. Or maybe you wanted a light to turn on or off, or a doll to spin, or maybe you wanted a light to turn on or off, or a doll to spin, or a door to open based on mouse movements within your Director movie, Applet, Flash Movie.
Photographs by Manabu Yamanaka, via kottke
The Hans Holbein Alphabet of Death, from the site Medieval Macabre.
The Food Museum: "Everything you'd expect to find in the world's only independent food museum will be found here. For the past five years we have been building online exhibits about the world's foods. You can search for a particular food by name, by hemisphere, and by type.… We've been putting up actual exhibits for over 25 years, from small galleries in Brussels and Washington to major exhibitions at the Smithsonian and Ottawa's National Museum of Science. "
Stéphane Louis, via the Solipsistic Gazette
The art of Antony Gormley.
(My parents never believed furniture was necessary, and when I look at bare rooms, I think home.)
Scott Radke's Marionettes. The doll on the left sort of looks like me.
Ben Tolman's self portrait on mushrooms
1.604.696.1328
Hi Nathalie !... Looking for something related with my work I was visiting your site, and I like it very much!... I'm a latin american artist living in Paris and my most recent work are related with food that I imagine and invented. I invite you to see my site and my work. Best regards !Carlos Poveda
www.carlospoveda.com
Gary Baseman, whose art I linked to last month, currently has a show in Minneapolis: Open Wounds, And Other Paintings About Vulnerability. More of his work can be found here.
Baseman's art reminds me of my recent (rough, rough) fiction, obsessed with the body and its vulnerabilities.
The Gargoyles of Notre Dame
"This collection of antique French postcards creates great excitement every time it's shown publicly."
On Doodles: art by Rachell Sumpter (via the excitement machine) and a selection from "Images That Lead Us to Parallel Realities" (via speckled paint).
Many art links today on my other blog, including links to online portfolios and games by Mr Bingo, enzyme design, Gary Baseman, and Sophie Thouvenin.
xray art by Bert Myers
xray art by Steven Myers
xray art by Sheila Pinkel
xray art by George Green
xray art by Daniel Buxton
xray art by Hugh Turvey
xray art by Wolfgang Reichmann
History of the xray.
Buy xray art here.
Related entries: XXX-rays, April 5, 2003; Floral Radiography, May 21, 2002.
Body Art
-To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, turn your DNA into art.
-Roxanne Wolanczyk's organ surveillance art.
-Yves Klein's Untitled Anthropometry.
Embody Art
-Body Art.
-Classic Mayan Beauty Tips.
-Bob Carey's self-portraits.
-"Artists, designers and people who have been to art school are a staggering five times more likely to suffer body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a mental illness characterised by a distorted body image and a preoccupation with slight or imagined defects in physical appearance than other mentally ill patients." [more>]
Imagery from the history of medicine.
17th-century poet John Dryden [wrote]: "Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally'd."Just how they are allied, of course, is a matter of intense interest, to the mentally ill, their families and their doctors. An entire smorgasbord of relevant topics, including lectures, workshops, panel discussions, art exhibitions, theatre, musical and dance pieces -- many of them performed by troupes whose members are themselves victims of mental illness -- is now underway (until March 30) at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre.
Produced by the Workman Theatre Project and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, it's being billed as the world's largest festival of Madness and Arts. [more>]
Those who suffer from mental illness tend to like the madness-art association. I'm one of those people. Here's why:
1. Depression creates the type of interiority that modernism worshipped and literature continues to value. Depression might not have created the language of interiority, but depressives, borrowing from that language to explain their illness, learn that language well.
2. Mental illness can inhibit creation, but creation allows for the sense that ones mental suffering, otherwise senseless, can be redeemed.
3. Madness may be an interpretation of stimuli that fails to rely on conventional contexts for understanding stimuli. Art may be, in part, the process of making things new. Then, both rely on disassociating from convention-- but one is a partial disassociation, still able to reference itself in terms of convention, and the other is a disassociation so complete, reference is impossible.
related entry: And, still not Van Gogh, May 25, 2002.
Two artists Leslie Hill and Helen Paris approached me with their Wellcome-sponsored "On the Scent" project, which is an installation/performance project to investigate the potential of smell to trigger memories and emotions. . . . There will be four chambers: reminiscence, false scents, making scents and on the scent. "Reminiscence" will be a sort of olfactory museum of smells from different times and cultures, designed so that people will encounter a range of familiar and new odours depending upon their age, ethnicity and place they grew up in. [more>]
For my senior year creative writing thesis, I made color inserts based on scans from Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body (above: my table of contents). I bought the book for $1.50 at the Brown Library's year-end sale, but it's also available online at http://www.bartleby.com/107/.
-interesting art projects (found at obscurantist)
-vintage television sets (via speckled paint)
-art*o*mat (also from speckled paint)
-sharpeworld's before and after gallery
-LOST LABOR: Images of Vanished American Workers 1900-1980 (via wood s lot)
I'd love to visit this sometime.
Pablo Picasso's Self-Portrait (1906), left, and Henri Matisse's Self-Portrait (1906)
In art, genius can be a hindrance. Not to popularity or success, but to empathy, and the rough edges that humanize. I mention this because the "Matisse Picasso" exhibit has come to MOMA, and "this is a tendentious, eye-educating, sometimes revelatory and usefully debatable event, whose parade of pairings and groupings of pictures by the two painters is a spectacle of institutional muscle only the Modern could manage."
My preference for Matisse may not say so much about my aesthetic taste as my (American? European? Romantic?) distrust of genius. Genius, as epitomized by Picasso, is prolific and flexible; challenge, not emotion, is the inspiration. I prefer to imagine art as an emotionally charged event, a document of personal engagement. An odd impression of genius: the genius is nothing more than his production, and his production is impersonal, mechanical. Where did this association of genius=robot come from? But there it is, deep and settled.
interactive:
Storm Front | Reactive Object| Mycelium Model| Node Study | Pixie Particle System | Maeda Keyboard
just pretty:
Binary Network | Torrus Export | Seeds | Mandlebrot Trema Generator
—from levitated.net/daily (found at right side of my brain)
"Explore the world in interactive virtual panoramas."
Van Gogh's "unabridged and annotated" letters are now online. You can navigate through them using categories like "art," "fear," "feelings," "food and drink," and "psychology."
The Ossuary in Sedlec: Where Human Bones Become Art.
[link via sharpeworld]
is now online. "Image Gate provides free and open access to thousands of The New York Public Library's digitized images, taken from the Research Libraries' collections." It now contains 80,000 images, and by 2004, will contain "more than 600,000. " An exploration-worthy site.
•ads from comic books [via no sense of place]
•vintage cowboy pinups [via muxway]
•superhero food gallery [via fimoculous]
•the 1000 journals project
•the 5 best online art museums
A short time later, when I happened to be visiting him, I popped the video into his VCR and proceeded to observe as Morrison's film once again began casting its spell. Errol sat drop-jawed: at one point, about halfway through, he stammered, ''This may be the greatest movie ever made.'' ''Made,'' of course, being the operative word. And not exactly by Bill Morrison, either. For, as it turned out, Morrison hadn't shot a single frame in the whole thing. Rather, his film, ''Decasia,'' was fashioned entirely out of snippets of severely distressed and heart-rendingly decomposed nitrate film stock: decades-old footage, taken from archives all around the country -- and at the last possible moment. [more>]See clips. MCMers: wipe the honey from your mouths.
Here's a link to lots of cool photo projects, including the Daily Photo Project.
Some excerpts from that:
Andy with light stache and cowlick (-)
Andy reading Camus at a ski lodge (+)
Andy majoring in math at a liberal arts college (-)
Hansel out to get you. (-)
With bangs (+)
Without bangs (-)
Hansel's debonair twin brother. (+)
Hansel as a German poet/philosophy grad. student. (-)
The mullet has wings! It's flying! (-)
And so on. The commentary, mine, not his. The +s and -s: free fashion tips.
"Naked butt ugly," by the way, refers to this photo project. Daily Photo Project found via Metafilter.
Is there something you have been aching to express or discuss, but for one reason or another have not yet found a way to feel comfortable doing so? Dial AgoraPhone! Upon calling, but before being connected directly through to the public, you will be greeted by a recorded voice giving a few details about AgoraPhone and tips on how to use the features. AgoraPhone preserves anonymity in that it performs no caller ID and records no logs. There is even the option of voice masking so that no one can recognize you. You can try on your voice before anyone else can hear you, to make sure you are happy with it. Whenever you are ready, the connection through to the public space is made by pressing the # key on the phone you are calling from. A full duplex audio link is then opened between you and the people and happenings in the remote public site of the AgoraPhone sculpture.
Salon now has a column on comics and graphic novels.
"[Adrian] Tomine is a master of the arts of both cartooning and fiction, and he uses each to complement the other. His panels are meticulously, nearly obsessively perfect, and his freakishly accurate mastery of human facial expressions means that many times, he is able to forgo lengthy plot explication altogether and say it all with spare dialogue and a glance or gesture. It makes one wish that MFA students intent on writing minimalist fiction would simply get themselves to the drawing board instead."
…my cable modem starts working again, this is the site I'm going to be spending time at: Dream Anatomy, Anatomical Dreamtime.
PJ Chmeil buys an old camera from a thriftshop and finds a roll of film inside it. If only we were all so lucky. But we can look at his found pictures here.
n. favorite no. 1
n. favorite no.2
Also found on his site: a large and very well-organized collection of photographs of signs.
Maddox knows good art, and your kids' art isn't. Excerpt:
That's interesting, everyone in this picture is white. Even the rainbow is white. Perhaps in an ideal world, everyone would be white isn't that right, Rachel? Or should I call you RACIST? Nice try, Hitler.
The Turner Prize nominees have been announced. You can check out some stills of their art at the Tate website.
pictures that make sense to me. Click to enlarge.
