you have to be careful online
where you browse and what
the net shows you
it’s a reflection of how
the modern age really is
nowadays ugly things are
cool

without being pessimistic
whatever happened to television?
swearing chefs
+ cockroach-eating celebrities
i’m in the wrong era, arrived too soon
or more likely, late

the world is too beautiful
to sit behind a screen
i can assure you if you look
out into the street
and wait for one moment
you will see something
truly astounding
but only if you know how to look

so I have recently attempted my performance of fountainhead.

I think it went quite well apart from the deserted nature of the gallery. Wish there was more people for me to interact with

ah well, it went good anyway, here’s some photos and the video that I made out of them

remember that the video is not art in itself, purely because I cannot work imovie very well, it is a documentation of the performance.

so yeah, the gallery and the theme park come together and rejoice in celebrations of disney art, commercialism, hypocrisy and joy.

In the Studio issue, Elise Noyez focuses on the photographic portrait of the artist as a (self-)representational strategy. Using a noteworthy photograph of early appropriation artist Elaine Sturtevant as a case study, Noyez discusses the changing standards of such photographic representations in relation to artist and artistic practice, as well as the appropriation of artistic images. Click here to read the essay.

“avant-garde is to be enslaved to a shallow notion of innovation for innovation’s sake, to favor the outrageous over the well-wrought, to cloak mediocrity in the robes of the rebel.” — david graver

I’m not trying to use this blog as commentary. In fact, my desire is to present these pictures in a completely neutral light other than the idea of ‘Go Bikes!’ With that in mind, please bear with me as I have a small rant I would like to get off my back.

I don’t know if you are aware of what is going on in Philadelphia but it is an absolute nightmare for anyone who rides a bicycle. The idea of having to register your bicycle as if it were a car is an impetuous, child-like response to a problem that is not to be left on the shoulders of one group. Fining brakeless riders $1000 with the possibility of taking their bike away from them shows a complete lack of respect for an individuals’ decisions and their personal property. I’m a Brooklyn resident who rides a bike with a brake on it, so the decisions in Philly don’t directly affect me (yet), but I still find the actions of the city’s government deplorable. The city needs to address the problem of unsafe conditions from the beginning, not the end. More bike lanes. More respect and awareness taught to motor vehicle drivers. More awareness from pedestrians. I’m also not saying the cyclists are faultless within the situation, but safer conditions would lead to stories like this rarely, if ever, happening.

I got into a pretty rough accident last summer and the calmest gentleman came up to me, asked me if I was okay and then offered this nugget of wisdom: “You shouldn’t be worried about your own ability to ride a bike, you should be worried about all of the other people who have zero ability to ride a bike.” I know the accidents were of a bicycle/pedestrian nature, but I think this is applicable. If you know how to ride a bike, assume everyone around you in a car, on foot, or on a bike is completely oblivious to the world around them. As cyclists, in a commuting, fashion, avid, or professional context, we need to apply what we know and anticipate that others don’t know.

Can I also quickly point out how laws strictly guiding the use of bikes will end up hindering the growth of biking as a means of transportation? People who are fantasizing about picking up a Pigeon, a Schwinn cruiser, a matchy-matchy track frame, a carbon Trek commuter, or that busted as hell 10 speed are instantly going to run away from an activity that requires registration, identification, and then the constant looming cloud of a ticket. Who wants to deal with all of that crap? The freedom of walking outside, getting on your bike, and just riding is squashed by the fast talking, too quick to act bureaucrats.

Ride safe everyone, and respect every form of locomotion out there.

RANT OVER. I promise to shut up and let the pictures flow. I leave you with bike art:

An undated handout photo shows Marcel Duchamp's ``Roue de bicyclette'' (Bicycle Wheel), one of just three artworks on display in the main hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof contemporary art museum in Berlin. The wheel is part of ``Art Is Super,'' an exhibition running through Feb. 4, 2010. (Hamburger Bahnhof Contemporary Art Museum/Bloomberg)

My blog entry Street Art & Galleries attracted a lot of comments some of them espoused a non-commercial ideal for street art. However, much of the free art on the streets appears to be advertising for street artist’s highly commercial enterprises, (see my blog entry Advertising & Graffiti). Street art is the most commercially accessible of contemporary movements; street art is far more commercial than even the Surrealism.  Street artists produce art from the high to low price range, from museum quality pieces to badges, and this allows anyone to purchase the artist’s work. Keith Haring opened shops in New York and Tokyo for his merchandise and generations of street artists have followed his example.

The marketing strategy of street artists is similar to that of KISS, the most commercially successful rock band ever. KISS gave extravagant concert tours at less than cost ticketing, as a promotion for the band’s t-shirts, figurines and other marketing spin offs that is KISS’s main revenue stream. Like fashion designers many of these artists also produce diffusion ranges – the number of sneaker, t-shirts and figurines by street artists is incalculable. Collectable is a sales feature for these limited editions designed by street artists.

Toys, miniatures and street art are not something that I’ve paid a great deal of attention to although I know that many well-known street artists make limited edition toys. It is not that I don’t understand that models making and miniatures are an art, especially after painting many models in my teenage years, it just isn’t my scene anymore. Dean Christ, who I met when he was exhibiting at the Melbourne Stencil Festival, sent me a link to some of his toys. These are not cute, they are very much boys toys. Dean Christ combines military vehicles with insect forms.

Street artists make many other promotional deals: from minor deals like putting a business’s name or logo on a legal work to major deals like local artist, Phibs’ YouTube video promotion for VB Raw. These many different income sources means that street artists, unlike most other artists, are not entirely dependent on gallery sales, arts council grants or other institutional funding.

Now I’m not opposed to artists making money and I am not criticizing these street artists mentioned for any of their commercial work. I am opposed to the idealism that generates the denial that street art is not commercial; a denial that is not unique to street art but is encountered in so many areas of the arts. Parts of the art world are reluctant to talk about money, as they want to be seen placing certain ideals above financial concerns. Medieval knights and royalty were not meant to engage in business or industry and some artists ape these antique manners. However, this is to deny the reality that art is connected to life, where artists have to live and make a living.

I am impressed with the marketing of street artists; many artists in history would envy their success. Many modern art groups wanted to be able to market their art democratically so that people of different income could afford it, however the technology and distribution market often did not support these enterprises. Marcel Duchamp tried producing men’s shirts, travel chess sets and picture discs (records with op art images) but there he was no internet to help generate international sales for him and none of these enterprises made a profit. The success of street art, an art movement that has spread around the world, is in part due its ability to be commercial successful.

As we continue adding websites to our del.ici.ous collection of bookmarks, we want to keep you informed of our favorite recent additions, organized by subject:

Fine Arts

Bruce Nauman Leave the Land Alone: Documentation of Bruce Nauman’s performance of Untitled (Leave the Land Alone), 1969/2009.

The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated: A Library of Congress exhibition documenting the work of photographer to the Tsar Sergei Mikhailovich Prokrudin-Gorskii.

French National Library’s Image Bank: A searchable collection of digital materials from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture: Website for the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Vézelay: Benedictine Abbey of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine: A searchable collection of digital images of the Abbey of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine at Vézelay, photographed by Alison Stones, and cataloged by the Digital Research Library at the University of Pittsburgh.

Architecture/ Design

Arch Daily: An the online source of continuous information for a growing community of thousands of architects searching for the latest architectural news: projects, products, events, interviews and competitions among others.

E. A. Seguy’s Butterflies: A digital collection of Seguy’s collotypes from the New York Public Library.

Environmental Design Archives: Gertrude Jekyll: Archival material from the University of California at Berkeley. The Jekyll collection includes presentation drawings, planting plans, plant lists, surveys, photographs, and correspondence relating to residential gardens throughout the United Kingdom.

Plastics Network: Website of an international collaborative project to promote an understanding of the study of plastics and design.

Tom Eckersley Poster Archive: A collection of digital images of Eckersley’s posters hosted by the Visual Arts Data Service, VADS, created from the artist’s archive at the University of the Arts in London.

Liberal Arts

American Treasures of the Library of Congress: Online exhibition displaying some 250 items from the Library of Congress collections, including some not currently on permanent display. The organizing principles of this exhibition are Memory, Reason and Imagination.

Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database: “The Literature, Arts, & Medicine Database is an annotated multimedia listing of prose, poetry, film, video and art that was developed to be a resource for teaching and research in MEDICAL HUMANITIES, and for use in health/pre-health, graduate and undergraduate liberal arts and social science settings.”

Transatlantic Slave Trade Database Images: A collection of images of places and vessels involved in the Transatlantic Slave trade, as well as slave portraits. This collection is part of the Voyages database project, which has collected archival data from all over the world to create an invaluable resource for scholars of the slave trade.

Van Gogh: The Letters: A project of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, offering all 902 letters to and from Van Gogh in digital format, with scans of the originals, transcripts and annotations.

Voice of the Shuttle – Cultural Studies: Voice of the Shuttle (VoS) is a subject gateway for humanities and humanities-related resources on the Internet.

Museums

Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity: MoMA exhibition displaying “over 400 works by some 100 Bauhaus teachers and students that reflect the extraordinarily broad range of the school’s output.”

New Ceramics Galleries, Victoria and Albert Museum, London: “Purpose built in 1909 for the display of the Ceramics collection the newly refurbished galleries tell the story of world ceramics, with 3000 objects on display from the earliest Chinese pottery to contemporary ceramic art.”

RISD Museum: The Brilliant Line: An exhibition of engravings from the Early Modern period.

Reunion des Musees Nationaux: A digital collection of art images from French museums.

The Virtual Museum of Iraq: Online exhibition of objects from Iraqi museums created by the Italian National Research Council.

“Dada e Surrealismo riscoperti”. Provocazione, dissacrazione, inconscio, rivoluzione… queste sono solo alcune parole chiave legate ai due movimenti. Ma il titolo e gli artisti esposti parlano da sé: Jean Arp, Costantin Brancusi, Victor Brauner, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalì, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Andrè Masson, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Erik Olson, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy… più altri nomi probabilmente meno noti (di qui il “riscoperti” nel titolo), comunque tutti artisticamente e storicamente importanti, per un totale di più di 500 opere esposte.

Prestiti da: Association Marcel Duchamp (Villiers-sous-Grez), Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre de création industrielle (Parigi), Fondation Arp (Clamart), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Roma), Matisse Foundation (New York) e altri ancora consultabili -assieme all’elenco di tutte le opere, selezione delle principali e altre informazioni generali- sul sito ufficiale riportato qui sotto.

Ci sono ancora tre mesi di tempo (fino al 7 febbraio 2010), la mostra è al Complesso del Vittoriano a Roma e il costo è di 10 euro (7,50 euro la riduzione). E il venerdì e il sabato è aperta fino alle 23.30!

fabio

http://www.comunicareorganizzando.it/mostre.asp?id=167

La elegante actividad artística del alemán Kurt Schwitters  estaba fundada sobre el collage: sobre sus telas se encontraban boletos de ómnibus, pedazos de afiches o de periódicos, lanas, botones, telas, etc.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

El collage es una técnica artística que consiste en ensamblar elementos diversos en un todo unificado. El término se aplica sobre todo a la pintura, pero por extensión se puede referir a cualquier otra manifestación artística, como la música, el cine, la literatura o el videoclip. Viene del francés coller, que significa pegar.

Del collage se depuró un principio previo o técnica cuyo primer creador fue al parecer el dadaísta Marcel Duchamp: el “objeto encontrado”, según la cual cualquier cosa que elige un artista es sacralizada como “arte”, desde una piedra que llama su atención en un camino a una imagen que le gusta en una revista. De ahí a la amalgama de “objetos encontrados” o collage hay sólo un paso.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collage

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Espacio Fundación Telefónica

Genealogías de cine

Lunes 23, martes 24 y miércoles 25 de noviembre de 2009 – 18hs

A cargo de David Oubiña, Eduardo Russo y Jorge La Ferla
Coordinación: Gerardo Yoel

No requiere inscripción previa

Los dispositivos que idearon los cronofotógrafos para poder descomponer el movimiento no son ajenos a ese universo de artefactos entre lúdicos y científicos que poblaron el siglo XIX con nombres tan estrafalarios como zootropo, praxinoscopio, etc., que fueron agrupados con el nombre genérico de ¨juguetes filosóficos¨. Este término de juguete filosófico encierra la expresión de una actividad en la que todavía se mantenían unidas la dimensión del juego y la del pensamiento. El cine se convertirá rápidamente en lo opuesto de la filosofía: uno será pura acción concreta allí donde la otra reclama reflexión abstracta. Al igual que el planteo del libro nos proponemos establecer en estas dos clases las relaciones que existen entre esta estética generada en los antecedentes del cine y referentes de la pintura como Marcel Duchamp, del video arte como Bill Viola y del cine como Jean Luc Godard.

No requiere inscripción previa

+54 11 4333 1300

+54 11 4333 1301

espaciofundacion@telefonica.com.ar

La prochaine conférence de Culture Toute ! se déroulera à l’espace Guillaume le Conquérant,  1530 rue de la Haie, à Bois-Guillaume le mardi 8 décembre à 18h30. Elle aura pour titre :

« Ouuuuuuuuh ! » : Les grands scandales au cinéma, au théâtre et à l’opéra

Hélios Azoulay a été le 20 octobre 2009 l’invité de Frédéric Taddéi sur France 3 dans son émission “Ce soir ou jamais” . La présentation ci-dessous est celle de l’émission sur le site de France 3.

“Hélios Azoulay, compositeur, plasticien et performer, fils spirituel de Dada, inventeur de la « musique incidentale », il a notamment enregistré L’ Extravagant Porte-bouteilles, composition réalisée à partir d’un authentique « ready-made » de Marcel Duchamp. Helios Azoulay a par ailleurs inventé un instrument de musique : le suprême clairon. Il a notamment publié Scandales ! Scandales ! Scandales ! (Lattès, 2008), une histoire du scandale en art, dans laquelle il revendique personnellement quelques attentats artistiques.”

http://ce-soir-ou-jamais.france3.fr/index-fr.php?page=emission&date=2009-10-20

La présentation du livre d’Hélios Azoulay sur le site des éditions Jean-Claude Lattès

Por la noche me quedé viendo un imán que tengo pegado en el refrigerador. “Duchamp Is Innocent” es lo que dice el fridge magnet con letras negras y fondo azul. Inocente:

- ¿De criar a artístas chiflados?
- ¿De su creativo y a la vez destructivo ready-made?
- ¿De que cada vez que vamos a un mingitorio (Fountain, 1917) evoquemos al arte y a Marcel?
- ¿De decir que la Mona Lisa es hot in the ass (“Elle a chaud au cul”)?
- ¿De dar ironía y subversión al arte del siglo XX?

Todos somos inocentes hasta que se demuestre lo contrario.

The greatest achievement of the new exhibition at the National Gallery, The Sacred Made Real, is its presentation of the 17^th century Spanish attitude to religion as more than just gory, sordid and self-lacerating. Instead, Christ’s death becomes full of both sorrow and hope. Retribution and redemption. The overstated ennui symbolic of Spanish Catholicism becomes instead a sustained and deeply felt meditation on the subjects of death, suffering, and injustice. The Christian fables become metaphoric and worthy, the emotions worth feeling and remembering. Anyone and everyone will be moved by this exhibition’s startling presentations of distress and anguish, and Christ’s narrative might be seen as the lesson it was originally intended as.

It is the success of these super-realistic works that they inspire emotion in their audience in and of themselves, and looking around this exhibition, even as an atheist, I found myself relating to the works, responding to the storylines delivered in canvas, wood, and paint, not to mention human hair and ivory, even where they were their most brazenly and shockingly sacrificial and Christian.

Pedro de Mena – Christ as the Man of Sorrows (Ecce Homo), 1673

 

In the above work, for instance, the brutality depicted – blood running down Christ’s back from the lacerations and from the crown of thorns – provokes heartfelt compassion. For me, the presented allegory oscillated within my anguished attempt to place my sincere reaction to it with recourse to my deepest problems with the Christian faith and the inherent cruelty of so many of its parables. 

Similarly, Francisco de Zurbarán’s Crucifixion inspired from me an empathetic and tangible response, but as the wonderful accompanying film illustrated at the end of the exhibition, the artistic genius behind it advances the cause enigmatically. Shown in the image below in a mock up of its original setting, the work was originally positioned in a portico of an office, viewable from a window to the right and above… painted with a light source matching its intended light source, the painting looks not only sculptural but life like as the body hangs in its niche privately and forlorn.

Francisco de Zurbarán – Christ on the Cross, 1627

Marcel Duchamp – Étant Donnés, 1946-1966

The attestions of reality reminded me awkwardly of Marcel Duchamp’s great final work Étant Donnés,a work enshrined similarly in privacy, pain, suffering and the unknown. Comparing them feels tantamount to something worse than blasphemy, and yet the comparison seems to hold. It imbues the work with a physicality beyond parable. 

Indeed, just as other works in this exhibition remind of either Ron Mueck’s hyper-realist works, or the self-congratulatory airs of trompe-l’oeil, the whole exhibition became for me again and again an inroad into ways of thinking about non-Christian art, modern art, modern life. Comparative art history with me at the centre enabled me to understand and appreciate the message. The brutality of Christ’s passion became no more enigmatic of suffering than the young woman’s in Duchamp’s masterpiece.

And so, beyond the un-missable and emotionally wrenching manifesto of the exhibition itself, here are a few of my own personal reflections on particular work to be found therein.

***

As one might expect, it was the Velázquez works which truly stood out in the exhibition, and one particularly gave in to my internalised art historical dialogue.

Diego Velázquez, Immaculate Conception, 1618-19

Salvador Dali – Christ of Saint John of the Cross, 1951

In this painting of the immaculate conception, I was struck first and foremost by the surrounds. I remember visiting the Prado in Madrid with my cousin Judith and her Madrileño husband Pablo many years ago. Pablo shared with me some of his and his artist father’s insights into the collection. I particularly remember him drawing my attention to Velázquez’s skies and asking me to keep them in mind, as we walked back out into the Madrid sun and gazed upwards. I was astonished to find one of Madrid’s proudest secrets, and further proof of Velázquez’s talent. Indeed, the skies of the Castillian countryside are oft-referred to as Velasqueños in the master’s honour.

The comparison of the idealised classical world at Mary’s feet and the earthly grounding of the Velasqueño sky makes me for an interesting juxtaposition. Similarly, I thought of Dali’s Christ from the Scottish national collection and wondered about the roots of its details; whether the lake and mountains, or the clouds were Catalunyan. I have long been fascinated by the sheer detailing of Dali’s greatest works, and his declarations of their origins in dreams. I wonder where reality takes hold in this work, and where it took hold in the dreams of this surreal master.

***

Another work in the exhibition, Alonso Cano’s The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, also caught my eye. It was unavoidably reminiscent of the Murakami work I had seen a week earlier in the Tate’s Pop Life exhibition, Milk,

Alonson Cano - The Vision of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, also known as ‘The Miracle of the Lactation’, 1657-1660

Takashi Murakami – Milk, 2009

 

and this comparison helped me think about the importantly maternal elements of Mary’s character in the bible, and what this stands for more broadly, alongside the improbably maternal elements of this vulgar take on Japanese and contemporary culture. The distinction is startling, and apparently a shocking indictment on both parental and maternal respect in a society ravaged by pop culture.

What they and all the works mentioned above have in common is a distillation of the exhibition at hand’s title. The sacred made real. As I approached the works and my thought processes as they arose from it, it appeared to me that, similarly, and maybe more particularly for an atheist, what the exhibition, and the works viewed out of context achieved was an attestation of the sacred nature of reality. The maternal, the paternal, our brethren, humanity, all of these things are absolute in our lives. Such artistic accomplishments as are on view here only serve to heighten the importance of life, and the recording of it. The talents on offer testify to the need for glorification of the every day, and one one’s trials and tribulations are no more important than another. We are all in this together.