30.5.08

Chris Glimour

A friend just sent me this link today. Its all cardboard!


28.5.08

Ampersand

Great blog. Ampersand deserves the attention.


via Daye

27.5.08

Weekend: Good Ol' Days

It was a gorgeous weekend; perfect for a trip to the CloistersAnd walks around the hood

Mel Chin

has my complete admiration
A conceptual artist that works with political, cultural, and social issues in a variety of mediums.
One of my favorite projects is the Revival Field in which he worked with Dr Rufus Chaney at the Pig’s Eye Landfill in St. Paul, Minnesota. They used plants called hyperaccumulators that draw heavy metals from soil. The heavy metal are draw up to the leaves of these plants and then harvested. The harvest is processed and the metal removed to create a usable fuel.
Stowell's Open is responsible for the Art 21 animation of this project.

22.5.08

Tell It Mr. Lif

Au Makes Sense

The band, Au, hails from Portland. The song is called Boute. Pitchfork writes, "Comprised of close-ups of hands, teeth and eyes, this video does a lot with key senses, which you know you wouldn't have noticed unless we pointed it out."
So true! And presumptuous and catty... aaaah the voice of the internet ;)
Also see birds sing

21.5.08

Art Is Life

LA Raven is identical Dutch twins, Liesbeth and Angelique Raeven. And I am not sure what to think of their work...
Ana Finel Honigman writes, " Under the heading "anorexia, art, war, rant," blogger "Culiblog" wrote that, "LA Raeven were launched into fame in February 2002 when they created a huge kafuffle with Wild Zone 1 & 2, a video installation exhibited at the ICA London. It was the first time that the twins showed themselves in their work, lolling about and being overly skinny amidst half-drunk glasses of white wine and a floor littered with the occasional mini-nibble. The gallery was infused with the artists' own feral scent, reportedly concocted from their very own pee. Of course the bourgeois art press found it so scandalous that female artists with anorexia should be able to express themselves about body image, that they censured the artists' call for participation before the exhibition, and a goodly deal of the exhibition's press. Just like in China!" -READ MORE AT SAATCHI

What I find more interesting than the dueling anorexia is the artists' view of themselves as social outsiders. R states, "I guess that we are referring to ourselves as our own subculture. We are not living in the culture in which most people live. We have different rules and a different relationship. We do not have a normal sister-relationship, yet we also can't refer ourselves as "partners." What we have is something which goes further than even what exists between lovers."

John Waters also explored the idea of individuals living outside the social norm in his '72 film called Pink Flamingos (trailer)And if you have seen the trailer or the movie, you'll understand why I land here

20.5.08

2008 Wathbath Summit

Honestly this year is not as impressive as '07 or '06 but I still go out of my way to walk past it.
Stagg St. btwn Union and Lorimer, Williamsburg Brooklyn

19.5.08

Chau Amigo

Sebas is going back to Chile .
So S and I made him a book .
I will be posting some of sebas' photography soon.

16.5.08

Proper Portions

This fractal drawer system by Takeshi Miyakawa Design makes me think of the golden rectanglewhich brings me full circle to my first internet quest this morning which was Jan Tschichol who said
"There was a time when deviations from the truly beautiful page proportions 2:3, 1:√3, and the Golden Section were rare. Many books produced between 1550 and 1770 show these proportions exactly, to within half a millimetre."
Fractal via thanks to

14.5.08

Formalist

I become fixated on this idea that art should be useful, proletariat and that purely aesthetical treatments are otiose. And then two things happen:
1. I am not entirely sure what that means
2. I come across artist like Jessica Stockholder whose work, simply put, I like.You know I’ve been thinking about why that matters and I think pleasure matters a great deal. Pleasure is very political and pleasure is part of what controls people. Advertising is directed at our pleasure and homophobia is about where people find pleasure. I think growing up, how and what pleasures us is carefully controlled. Socially, people have a lot of opinions about it. Babies, pacifiers, and bottles—hugely fraught subject because it has something to do with people’s pleasure. -jessica stockholder

9.5.08

6.5.08

Light: Step 2

On Thyme!

As I have mentioned before, I am documenting the germination and growth of 5 different seeds.
Thyme is the first to show itself. Excuse the lack of focus.

2.5.08

Art is Work

Milton Glaser has made an impact.
I promise I will lay off the youtube after this ;) via
posters

and Ten Things That Milton Has Learned:
#7
HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.
The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how - that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.

1.5.08

If The People Lead....

We are the economy. Its strange that we can feel so helpless when we have so much power.
I love carrotmob's approach. This is the new revolution. We will not waste our energy on anger or attack. But we can take the power back.
FYI there is much more after the dance-music video bit so stay with it

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

Another link from my friend Daye out in LA who is doing some amazing public work herself. Maybe if I plead here in front of everyone she will tell us about it here. Pretty please.