Sunday, January 13, 2013
Wednesday, January 09, 2013
Sunday, January 06, 2013
50 corpses were found behind a boys school in Florida, with some evidence of sexual abuse, they were expecting 30.
on the rise of DIY abortions, excellent peice of writing, a combination of personal stories , larger histories and recent trends. The recent "fetus personhood" regulations and the refusal to legalise/medically supervise pharmaceutical aborofacients are important to note.
Africa is a Country's top ten contested image.
I love when O Hara speaks outloud.
Dolly Parton and Hee Haw pinball machines.
if you want context on Django Unchained, Alex Cox's book on the Spaghetti Western from 1978, is canonical, but has been out of print for more than a decade. Cox put it up on his website as a pdf.
Bill Wyman's article debunking Michael Jackson's album sales, is really about the history of record companies.
i love this alberta themed great horned owl print.
laser cut nautical maps
Taylor Swift and Def Leperd.
the weird, bleached out, almost pastel tones in these photos of tennis courts ironically collapse 80s failures of architechture and the historicizing potential of digital methods into perfect tourist attempts.
burlap and grasscloth wallpaper.
there could be an essay written on british business culture and competing masculinities, as found in these 20s poster.
Enid Chadwick's Childrens Book of the New Year, has that early 20th century, popululist neo-medivealism, an updating of Morris or a more colourful Gill, just gorgeous.
Looking onto the Mies from Nun's island, artist unknown.
Thanks to Shoup, Brian Joseph Davis' write an epic poem of Xgau's disses. Brad being Brad, he's worked out the positive mirror image: here
El Antusi did a mural for the highline that is insanaely epic in scale--all across a manhattan midrise.
Irish Farmers Calendar, where they are mostly shirtless
The wood frame, the colour, the bolster pillows that it's Modern and modern and neo-Classical and just a tiny bit regency, the elegant pluralism of this, this courch will change yr life.
In it's own genteel way Toobin's obit of Bork, also for the NYer, is as evisvercating as HST for Nixon.
abandoned amusement parks
one of the questions that i had about martin, for decades, was how she worked so many hours, but produced so little--full 8 hour days, and maybe 12 paintings a year, and only a handful of drawings, and with a few exceptions, no distinct print practice. This interview with her galleriest, talks about how near the end of his life, that he helped her destroy paintings that he thot were gorgeous, but Martin thot were formally flawed. This suggests that the skill that Martin had was not only (or even perhaps not mostly) object curation but object creation.
speaking of martin, here is a great lecture by Katz on the implications of formal questions and how it functions as a matrice with her personal life:
(how he talks about grids will change yr life)
USDA's collection of State Soils
they are pirating whole buildings now
6 photos of exquistely displayed rolls of coloured tape.
masonic weapons, with symbols in the clockworks.
squid hanging lamps.
fifteen photos of the SF Streetcar boneyard.
This article from the star states directly what i have suspected for a long time, namely that the FOIA works as an obsfuctating tool, which might have been a feature instead of a bug, from the view of the gvt.
“Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (1916), a small, framed wool needlepoint tapestry by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture. The work bespeaks a subtle eye, a sober mind, and an ardent heart. If you could make something like that, you would drop everything else and do it. You wouldn’t need any great reason. I was mildly shocked by how unshocking Taeuber-Arp’s work is, amid rooms of strenuous sensations from the epoch of abstract art’s big bang. But, in a show that raises the question “Why?” at every turn, I kept coming back to it
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2013/01/07/130107craw_artworld_schjeldahl#ixzz2HHmzvAeS
on the rise of DIY abortions, excellent peice of writing, a combination of personal stories , larger histories and recent trends. The recent "fetus personhood" regulations and the refusal to legalise/medically supervise pharmaceutical aborofacients are important to note.
Africa is a Country's top ten contested image.
I love when O Hara speaks outloud.
Dolly Parton and Hee Haw pinball machines.
if you want context on Django Unchained, Alex Cox's book on the Spaghetti Western from 1978, is canonical, but has been out of print for more than a decade. Cox put it up on his website as a pdf.
Bill Wyman's article debunking Michael Jackson's album sales, is really about the history of record companies.
i love this alberta themed great horned owl print.
laser cut nautical maps
Taylor Swift and Def Leperd.
the weird, bleached out, almost pastel tones in these photos of tennis courts ironically collapse 80s failures of architechture and the historicizing potential of digital methods into perfect tourist attempts.
burlap and grasscloth wallpaper.
there could be an essay written on british business culture and competing masculinities, as found in these 20s poster.
Enid Chadwick's Childrens Book of the New Year, has that early 20th century, popululist neo-medivealism, an updating of Morris or a more colourful Gill, just gorgeous.
Looking onto the Mies from Nun's island, artist unknown.
Thanks to Shoup, Brian Joseph Davis' write an epic poem of Xgau's disses. Brad being Brad, he's worked out the positive mirror image: here
El Antusi did a mural for the highline that is insanaely epic in scale--all across a manhattan midrise.
Irish Farmers Calendar, where they are mostly shirtless
The wood frame, the colour, the bolster pillows that it's Modern and modern and neo-Classical and just a tiny bit regency, the elegant pluralism of this, this courch will change yr life.
In it's own genteel way Toobin's obit of Bork, also for the NYer, is as evisvercating as HST for Nixon.
abandoned amusement parks
one of the questions that i had about martin, for decades, was how she worked so many hours, but produced so little--full 8 hour days, and maybe 12 paintings a year, and only a handful of drawings, and with a few exceptions, no distinct print practice. This interview with her galleriest, talks about how near the end of his life, that he helped her destroy paintings that he thot were gorgeous, but Martin thot were formally flawed. This suggests that the skill that Martin had was not only (or even perhaps not mostly) object curation but object creation.
speaking of martin, here is a great lecture by Katz on the implications of formal questions and how it functions as a matrice with her personal life:
(how he talks about grids will change yr life)
USDA's collection of State Soils
they are pirating whole buildings now
6 photos of exquistely displayed rolls of coloured tape.
masonic weapons, with symbols in the clockworks.
squid hanging lamps.
fifteen photos of the SF Streetcar boneyard.
documentary on Kaneshatake and first nations resistance.
This article from the star states directly what i have suspected for a long time, namely that the FOIA works as an obsfuctating tool, which might have been a feature instead of a bug, from the view of the gvt.
“Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (1916), a small, framed wool needlepoint tapestry by Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Rectangles and squares in black, white, red, blue, gray, and two browns, arranged on an irregular grid, generate a slightly dissonant, gently jazzy visual harmony that is pleasantly at odds with the tapestry’s matter-of-fact, nubbly texture. The work bespeaks a subtle eye, a sober mind, and an ardent heart. If you could make something like that, you would drop everything else and do it. You wouldn’t need any great reason. I was mildly shocked by how unshocking Taeuber-Arp’s work is, amid rooms of strenuous sensations from the epoch of abstract art’s big bang. But, in a show that raises the question “Why?” at every turn, I kept coming back to itRead more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2013/01/07/130107craw_artworld_schjeldahl#ixzz2HHmzvAeS
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
2012 goals:
a) finish thesis
yep/
b) find place to stay/granting/etc post may.
yep.
c) finish grad school apps for concordia, union, harvard, berkley
got to concordia.
d) work on publications for disability, kurt, rachel
steady progress made.
e) finish the frog piece
most likely funded and ready to go next summer.
f) pitch tormorden mills peice
g) figure out alaska
h) boston conference
dropped due to cash.
i) pay mom back.
nope
j) pysch stuff
ect
k) tooth stuff
working on it.
2013 Goals:
- Continue Kurt Work.
- Continue Atlantic Work.
- Work on one Application, Conference Pitch, Fellowship, or the Like a month.
- Get a minimum B average
- Figure out Quebec Disability
- Have one social event a week.
- Ask someone new for social times once a month.
- Find things to do post-April.
- Walk around new neighbourhoods.
- Pysch Stuff.
- Supercut
- CAMH Art Project
- 6 Small Sermons for Satan.
- Peice wiht Clint.
Monday, December 31, 2012
In the 1950s, if you turned on the television, you'd most likely see a
western. The television shows with the most episodes are still mostly
westerns that originated in the 1950s. These westerns were often about how men
lived with other men. They became a set of social codes, working out the limits
of intimacy, and the implications of this intimacy. The westerns aimed at male children
taught and reinforced specific elements of masculinity, namely that the
act of being a boy would lead to the proper ways of being a man.
Watching work like Cheyenne
or Gunsmoke or Bonazanna, through this lens, the viewer could wonder why the
teaching of masculinity seemed so vital. There are a number of ideas, but
thinking about the violence of World War II, and that many of these westerns
came from Radio in the 1940s, might provide a solution. It seems that in the
1950s, being a man had stricter criteria. Perhaps, the closeness of men in the
barracks, trenches, and on ships suggested that two things—that there should be
work that reflected this closeness, but that this closeness could not be
mistaken for other kinds of intimacy.
This tension between portraying male intimacy, but precluding other
kinds of intimacy seems to be the key to other tensions, and other ways of
processing desire. The children who were told about the “cowboy” or
western way of life in the 1950s, who were taught to work through the values of
the west, ended up being part of the liberation of the 1970s. In the 1970s, in
depictions of men who have sex with men, there was a glut of films, pulp
novels, magazines, periodicals, comics, and social groups that attempted to reconcile
the almost celibate lessons of masculinity in the cultures that were taught
them in the 1950s, with the sexuality that they wished to participate in. The
homosocial core of soldier or western life would become homosexual. This is not
a direct correlation--one did not automatically lead to another. But the
tensions between sexuality and sociality, between male worlds of the west, and
male worlds of sexual culture, have a delicate webbing of wish fulfillment,
cultural memory, the personal archive, and the social world.
This is not only about how men interact with men though. The
stories of the west were attempts to determine geography as well. The westerns
of the 1950s were set in Laramie or Cheyenne or Dodge City, Kansas. In the 1950s,
the shows indicated a desire for a kind of purity of place. The queer
reclaiming occurring in the 1970s, often explicitly featured tension between
people from New York or Los Angeles, versus people from the Midwest. The
geographical authenticity that marked the policing of masculinity earlier
became part of the unstable processing of erotic desire, 20 years later.
This problem of the liminal space between the homosocial and the
homoerotic in the west is not solved, and has several more ironic turns.
Thinking about the politicians who have worked out the cowboy motif, in the
1980s and 1990s--there is the refusal of the homoerotic, but the return of the
homosocial, a well guarded place where the impossibility of any kind of
ambiguous desire reigns. Thinking about Reagan, who starred in a number of
B-Westerns in the 1940s and 1950s, both on film and television--it could be
said that his use of masculinized rhetoric was another way of approaching the
social memory of the earlier texts. There was not needed a question of sexuality,
but there were questions or problems of geography.
Finally, George W. Bush, who used Reagan as a political and
social example, became an abstraction of an abstraction. Moving from the
Eastern elite, to Texas; from a wasted life, to the presidency, could only be
done in a kind of Cowboy drag. This again, works through the problems of
homosocial contact, without being homoerotic at all--which refuses the
homoerotic conflation of the homosocial. It also reinforces the obsessive
seeking of purity in the American West.
In
conclusion, and to make these questions explicitly academic: I am interested in how the West constructs
concepts of masculinity, especially in the mutability and maintenance of
identifiers, and how those identifiers are constructed both by interior
reserves and exterior forces. My interest also includes how popular culture
mediates common ideas of masculinity, and how heterosexism complicates the
liminal spaces between homosociality and homosexuality.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Wednesday, December 05, 2012
Propsoal forYork Graduate Art History Conference:
Paper Title:
The Panda and the Jack-Rabbit: Some notes on Recent Porn’s
escape from the Monstrous.
Paper Abstract:
One of the problems with monsters, is that they refuse to
contain themselves—the image of the monster is often constructed as an image of
rampant and unrepentant sexuality (see the centaur or satyr, the harpy, the goat headed Satan, or the Succubae and Incubi in European culture.) The transgression of sexual profligacy with hints
of bestiality and other more liminal spaces is traditionally terrifying. So some recent pornography, which uses famous
performers in animal masks, unsettles these traditional definitions.
Colby Keller is a gay porn star has a reputation as a writer,
artist and educator around issues of sexuality and pornography. In the last
month he released a self-consciously “arty” remake of 1970s gay porn classic, Boys in the Sand, where he fucks and is
fucked, while wearing a rabbit mask. James
Deen is a straight porn star who has become somewhat of a teen icon, while
writing about porn. He also acts in more mainstream vehicles. Last year he released
a video where he and five other men dress in panda costumes and have sex with
one woman.
These two figures, have positioned themselves as aesthetes
who use their chosen medium against its literal intentions (i.e. porn’s purpose
is formal and social, not just to get off).
This move from a use function of porn to a more formal capability suggests
a set of stagings are occurring--providing an ironic or formal distance. This distance works obliquely to the text
provide a way for the monstrous to escape.
This escape happens through two methods: Colby's self-aware
queerness allows viewers to taxonomize this as camp. Deen's self-awareness suggests
that he knows he is engaging in a performance. By allowing this work to be
simultaneously an erotic and a formal event, we echo the slippages between
human and beast, but do so positively. In this sense, the erotic consumer, by
allowing the monstrous to work through their bodies, processes and isolates the
tradition itself.
Saturday, December 01, 2012
In Memory of World AIDS Day--living after the retrovirals, after the campaigns, after the memoirs ended up in used book stores, after the art ended up in museums, after the plague years, where fucking was less lethal but nostalgia was more so, after coming out thru history. After the exhaustion, a pure Beckett desire to go on, in a moment of what seemed like endless requiem. Growing up in Central Alberta, hearing that you would die of it, as a curse for pleasures that still seemed disruptive--where if you survived the bashings, the institutional neglect, the desire to kill yrself, yr reward would be dying and then realizing every day that you were alive that you had won. Realizing that fucking would still be criminalized, that not talking or talking about fucking would still be stigmatized, still waiting to see if this trick or that lover would be the one that would result (no matter how careful you were) would be the one that resulted in the l
ong term maintenance of another disease, the expectation and then the living without that expectation. Still, even though you know about the world, even though you know that this is the narcissism of privilege, even though you have read from the beginning about Brazil, about Africa, about India--about poverty, about the problems of the west interfering, no matter how angry you are about all of that...the history and potential of AIDS in yr small community, among fellow faggots, isolates you further from the breeders, makes you less straight--no matter how much you love yr straight friends, no matter how much they are allies, the blue black bruises written on the body, the wasting, and the terror can never fully be read on them. This, this World AIDS Day, let us pray.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Thursday, November 22, 2012
some things i think i think about act up after watching hubbards doc
a) the quote: "irrevance cannot come from consensus" anna blum seems to be central to the tension between the thing doing the acting and the acting that is being done.
b) i wonder about one of the narratives here--where the radical direct action was intended to pressure drug companies and governments into indirect action--to get a meeting--that the mechanics of the state were used against the state itself (the lawsuits against the cdc) and the death and exhaustion of the later actions was giving up on the desire to get meetings. (esp the ones featuring bodies and cremains)
c) but that the meetings happened, and the screening was sponsored by drug companies, and the movie was funded by state agencies, and the archives are at establishment harvard.
d) who got the meetings then, though the second half of the documentary was about women and working class people--and women's health collective's provided the ordering structures act up built on--i wonder if message creep and quesitons of who to include become parts of a still to answer spectrum. David W's poverty and drug use should be noted to complicate the white gay man/women of colour dialectic that perhaps emerges here (are there similar questions of status and access that invade paris is burning?)
e)these questions of access and who gets to talk, suggest one of the things that is unspoken about act up, and one that is. the unspoken is that perhaps the problem of process oriented collective thot requires too much energy, and takes too much effort, it prevents access to those who do not have the energy or the commitment--can act up style direct action scale up or down, was it strangled in a different kind of red tape--not in the red tape of beurocracy, but the red tape of activism. is this what happened to occupy?
f) the one that is spoken is about the movement at st pats--i have many things to say about this. cardinal o'connor was an asshole; the church needs to be morally accountable for the deaths it caused; that we owe those who seek our destruction no fealty; that we would not convince those praying anything; that if i saw the current cardinal of new york it would take all my effort not to spit in his face. the church is not o'connor; that at st vincents or at hospices or among nurses and nuns and convenant house, it was morally accountable; that to be silent and stacked like cord wood in fornt of the altar, an altar that reminds us of the death and rising of the body of christ (and that we are part of the body of christ) has a noetic power; that respecting process is respecting the voice of those who dissent...
g) that i am able to write and say this, that i am able to negoiate a space for myself, because of the work that not only act up, but the radical work of the 70s, that emerged from the 60s, that listened to the movement of the 30s etc, that there is a genology of action here--watching all of those videos of arrests reminded me of nothing more than peter seeger singing go limp.
h) i cried. there is this line from derrida: "is circumcision itself an exterior mark, is it an archive" our archives are written on bodies. our bodies are exterior marks--not just pussy and prick, but lesions and wasting, the temporary marks of plastic ties, and the permanent marks of tattoos, the exterior mark, the interior archive, and the haunting of voices that make these marks function post mortem--that allow for these negotited spaces on them--the rectum is not only a grave, it is a masulalem; the freudian bed is where the limpness leads to a kind of rot, but that rot allows for the growth of more undergrowth.
i) never under-estimate the power of fierce fashion, of elegant graphic design, of good font choices, of dressing to fuck, of using politics in order to fuck, to fuck thru the rectum's masuleum.
a) the quote: "irrevance cannot come from consensus" anna blum seems to be central to the tension between the thing doing the acting and the acting that is being done.
b) i wonder about one of the narratives here--where the radical direct action was intended to pressure drug companies and governments into indirect action--to get a meeting--that the mechanics of the state were used against the state itself (the lawsuits against the cdc) and the death and exhaustion of the later actions was giving up on the desire to get meetings. (esp the ones featuring bodies and cremains)
c) but that the meetings happened, and the screening was sponsored by drug companies, and the movie was funded by state agencies, and the archives are at establishment harvard.
d) who got the meetings then, though the second half of the documentary was about women and working class people--and women's health collective's provided the ordering structures act up built on--i wonder if message creep and quesitons of who to include become parts of a still to answer spectrum. David W's poverty and drug use should be noted to complicate the white gay man/women of colour dialectic that perhaps emerges here (are there similar questions of status and access that invade paris is burning?)
e)these questions of access and who gets to talk, suggest one of the things that is unspoken about act up, and one that is. the unspoken is that perhaps the problem of process oriented collective thot requires too much energy, and takes too much effort, it prevents access to those who do not have the energy or the commitment--can act up style direct action scale up or down, was it strangled in a different kind of red tape--not in the red tape of beurocracy, but the red tape of activism. is this what happened to occupy?
f) the one that is spoken is about the movement at st pats--i have many things to say about this. cardinal o'connor was an asshole; the church needs to be morally accountable for the deaths it caused; that we owe those who seek our destruction no fealty; that we would not convince those praying anything; that if i saw the current cardinal of new york it would take all my effort not to spit in his face. the church is not o'connor; that at st vincents or at hospices or among nurses and nuns and convenant house, it was morally accountable; that to be silent and stacked like cord wood in fornt of the altar, an altar that reminds us of the death and rising of the body of christ (and that we are part of the body of christ) has a noetic power; that respecting process is respecting the voice of those who dissent...
g) that i am able to write and say this, that i am able to negoiate a space for myself, because of the work that not only act up, but the radical work of the 70s, that emerged from the 60s, that listened to the movement of the 30s etc, that there is a genology of action here--watching all of those videos of arrests reminded me of nothing more than peter seeger singing go limp.
h) i cried. there is this line from derrida: "is circumcision itself an exterior mark, is it an archive" our archives are written on bodies. our bodies are exterior marks--not just pussy and prick, but lesions and wasting, the temporary marks of plastic ties, and the permanent marks of tattoos, the exterior mark, the interior archive, and the haunting of voices that make these marks function post mortem--that allow for these negotited spaces on them--the rectum is not only a grave, it is a masulalem; the freudian bed is where the limpness leads to a kind of rot, but that rot allows for the growth of more undergrowth.
i) never under-estimate the power of fierce fashion, of elegant graphic design, of good font choices, of dressing to fuck, of using politics in order to fuck, to fuck thru the rectum's masuleum.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Pazz and Jop Longlists--of course one is always longer than the other.
- Solange Losing You
- Frank Ocean American Wedding
- Coup Your Parents Cocaine
- Scissor Sisters Let's Do A Kiki
- Le1f Wut
- Rhinia (ft Eminem) Numb
- Eric Church Drink in My Hand
- fun. ft Janaelle Monae We Were Young
- Sinead O Connor The Wolf is Getting Married
- Nelly Furtado Parking Lot
- Whitehorse Devil
- Carly Rae Jespen Call Me Maybe
- Santigold Disparate Youth
- Frank Turner's Sailor Boot
- An Brun These Days
- Bat For Lashes All Your Gold
- Spoek Moetha Control
- Black Tears Jason Aldean
- Southern Comfort Zone Brad PAisley
- We Are Never Ever Getting Back together Taylor
- Boyfriend Justin Beiber
- Jinx Monsoon Ladies Who Lunch
- Hayes Carll Stomp and Holler
- Father John Misty Hollywood Cemetery Forever
Albums:
- Spoek Mathamaba--Father Creeper
- Frank Ocean Orange
- Corb Lund
- Dwight Yoakham Three Pears
- Josh Turner Punching Bag
- Sinead O Connor
Sunday, November 18, 2012
a dozen og photos of terrible taxidermy
fascinating piece of writing about the culture of football, one man teabags another, the victim passed out drunk at a NoLa burger joint. The story tells of the consquences of that actio.
Toronto Poetry Broadsides from the 2010 Scream Festival.
This just needs the subhead:
A man who dresses up as a giraffe and carries out random acts of kindness towards people across Scotland has said he does it to feel good.
Girogia Griffa is an Italian painter from the 70s--radically simply, pigments on raw canvas or burlap, sets of lines or squiggles, in barely present pastels. Towards the edge of marking.
Rare live performance of the Cuckolded Husband, explicitly references to castration, from a private concert in Ed McCurdy in the early 1960s.
my friend Graham in Zambia, writes about Alberta.
The best thing about Stan Bitters early expirments in Cermaics, is that they have the same formal innovation as fellow californian Ken Price--but instead of wit and subtlety, Bitters goes in for crude bluntness, there is something charming in the sheer ugliness of his work. esp. the yellow and blueblack glazes in teh second link.
Batson is an English designer. who makes really simple shifts, with really bright digital prints--this one is of a autumn poplar and a blue sky--plays with Kitsch, but settles on the problems of representaiton in the digital age.
Hawaiian Wallabies
Kate Beaton on Sandy
this review of Urvashi Uradi's new book and some recent interviews by bell hooks suggest a pushing back on the ubiquity of marriage.
13 minute live performance by Luke Bryan--an article on genre hyrbdity can come out of this.
sometimes you don't need anything subtle. Superflex, the Danish Collective, makes banners featuring the logos of dead banks--halfway between notes on vanquished enemies, and marks of those who have power--plus a certain wryness about the design and fine art.
and sometimes you need super subtle Bill Walton, from Philly, has been making assembaleges for 40 years. They are mostly about the question of what makes sculpture--questions of forms that repeat, turn in on themselves, unify by colour, encompass or expand, including work that is found, placed, or constructed--and the differences between those three questions.
vintage cowboy tumblr
this comic made me cry
I am writing a long article about Thomas for my methodology prof, and one of the pleasures of it, is how much i love his writing
Nick Lachey Self Portrait, looks like Jim PEirson.
fascinating piece of writing about the culture of football, one man teabags another, the victim passed out drunk at a NoLa burger joint. The story tells of the consquences of that actio.
Toronto Poetry Broadsides from the 2010 Scream Festival.
This just needs the subhead:
A man who dresses up as a giraffe and carries out random acts of kindness towards people across Scotland has said he does it to feel good.
Girogia Griffa is an Italian painter from the 70s--radically simply, pigments on raw canvas or burlap, sets of lines or squiggles, in barely present pastels. Towards the edge of marking.
Rare live performance of the Cuckolded Husband, explicitly references to castration, from a private concert in Ed McCurdy in the early 1960s.
my friend Graham in Zambia, writes about Alberta.
The best thing about Stan Bitters early expirments in Cermaics, is that they have the same formal innovation as fellow californian Ken Price--but instead of wit and subtlety, Bitters goes in for crude bluntness, there is something charming in the sheer ugliness of his work. esp. the yellow and blueblack glazes in teh second link.
Batson is an English designer. who makes really simple shifts, with really bright digital prints--this one is of a autumn poplar and a blue sky--plays with Kitsch, but settles on the problems of representaiton in the digital age.
Hawaiian Wallabies
Kate Beaton on Sandy
this review of Urvashi Uradi's new book and some recent interviews by bell hooks suggest a pushing back on the ubiquity of marriage.
13 minute live performance by Luke Bryan--an article on genre hyrbdity can come out of this.
sometimes you don't need anything subtle. Superflex, the Danish Collective, makes banners featuring the logos of dead banks--halfway between notes on vanquished enemies, and marks of those who have power--plus a certain wryness about the design and fine art.
and sometimes you need super subtle Bill Walton, from Philly, has been making assembaleges for 40 years. They are mostly about the question of what makes sculpture--questions of forms that repeat, turn in on themselves, unify by colour, encompass or expand, including work that is found, placed, or constructed--and the differences between those three questions.
vintage cowboy tumblr
this comic made me cry
I am writing a long article about Thomas for my methodology prof, and one of the pleasures of it, is how much i love his writing
Nick Lachey Self Portrait, looks like Jim PEirson.
Sunday, November 04, 2012
Diane Wolfthal's book on the bed, the bath, and the dressing area in late medieval and early modern Art History, In and Out of the Marriage Bed (2010, Yale), has a kind of fascinating idea about van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. Because the subject was a banker and merchant, and because bankers and merchants made material that from which was immaterial, they were often compared to sodomites--and so the portrait, could perhaps be considered Arnolfini's way of fronting--of saying look at me, with the bed and the dog and the oranges and the wife--all of this finery--it isn't dead matter out of dead matter, this isn't sodomy--this is fertility. She doesn't sayt this directly, but I wonder if the portrait becomes a mark in how the idea of money changed hands--from the immaterial and infertile, to the material and fertile?
Thursday, November 01, 2012
five points
a) the epistles are works that are intended to settle questions of identity construction in emerging communities.
b) these questions of identity construction often settle on binary oppoistions though the questions originally placed are intensely ambigious, and often hybridic
c) the problem in settling these binaries or even constructing hybrids (i.e Queer/Rigidly Phallocentric, Active Sexual/Passive Sexual, Animal/Human, Leader/Follower, Woman/Leader, Hairy/Not Hairy,
Jewish/Something Else) is that one side wins--which means that their is a haunting--that the "lesser pairs" leave residue of conquest.
a) the epistles are works that are intended to settle questions of identity construction in emerging communities.
b) these questions of identity construction often settle on binary oppoistions though the questions originally placed are intensely ambigious, and often hybridic
c) the problem in settling these binaries or even constructing hybrids (i.e Queer/Rigidly Phallocentric, Active Sexual/Passive Sexual, Animal/Human, Leader/Follower, Woman/Leader, Hairy/Not Hairy,
Jewish/Something Else) is that one side wins--which means that their is a haunting--that the "lesser pairs" leave residue of conquest.
d) these residue of conflict often suggest that non-cannonical sources work as "steam valves" that allow for alternative discourses
e) the question becomes a rzhimoatic one, then---how to absorb or construct narratives that refuse those heirarchies?
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Bence Hadju is a dutch artist who photoshops people out of old master paintings--the gifs of theme populated and unpopulated in the link are distracting, the original is eerie, and works past the gimmick.
speaking of photoshop, this new show at the Met, about manipulated photos before digital culture, that works to reconsider what the history of photography means, and about it as a techincal and social as much of an artistic media.
posters and t shirts of world runways.
a variety of school composition books
Alison Brie and Gillian Jacobs in vintage lingerie play at being pin-ups, not only sexy as hell, a genius work of physical comedy, and a pretty great soundtrack,
a dozen or so pics of Rosewell, NM
Roberta Smith's review of the new Ai Wei Wei show is really well written, and works out some of the problems in his practice--it is smart, poltiically aware work, and uses the politics of visual spectacle to elucidate both the problems of China, and the problems of the West's realtionship with China--much of this work is relational, and because we live in the 21st century, relational works in relation to the digital. The question becomes two fold, is his work politics using the rubic of art, art using the rubic of politics, and if it is both--does it function as an aesthetic excercise? The photo work in the 1980s, which was also mentioned by Jerry Saltz, seems to be the beginning of this crisis, are they tourist photos of ny in the 80s, are they an immigrants expereince, are they aping earlier, better ny aesthetics, or are they acts of translation. I think that Wei Wei's best work refuses modernism's art for art's sake, and also the fascile shallowness of much American poltical work, and so by extension, even if it isn't "Great Art" it is vital.
the lost creeks of Edmonton. the lost creeks and rivers of toronto
Federal Prosecutors sue the Bank of America for 1b.
More eccentric Victoriana from Jess Nevins, this time featuring a Robot Ostritch.
Everytime that William Gibson writes about the aesthetics of the future, he adds these tiny prescient details from fields that he really shouldn't follow but does--here he talks about fashion, and has really really smart things to say about McQueen.
Jess Ragan is a typesetter and letter press artist who takes brilliant photos of NY fonts.
Jean Nouvel Carousel under the water of Hurricane Sandy last night.
Zak and Fox are designers and textile artists, this is there pinboard.
Todd Romano photos of a tiny ny apt with glossy navy blue walls
Mike Davis the brilliant socialist critic of cities, talks about the history of LDS' realtionship to social utopias, and their collective forgetting. He is not wrong, and it is one thing that critics of the church miss. The other side, the John Birch, isolaitonist, paleo-con side, now embodied by Glenn Beck, is also not remembered by Romney--and Young's cagey state craft, has elements of both. Their is a tradition in LDS culture that he does embody though, the low key, statist, middle of the road conserative, the willingness to give up Desert for America for example--the kind embodied by Benson under Eisenhower or Hatch or even Mitt's father--this is a tradition that is under written about in his history, and one that Davis, as an excellent critic of statist systems, should have picked up on.
Playable Tetris Pumpkin.
Dave Heaton's review on Kip Moore's new album is a kind of referendum on what his nusic means--smooth with a gorgeous voice, and a commitment to pleasure, the line between a bland genric quality and a smart blankness that reads as universal is difficult to parse, and as much as I like the album, what it means has never really settled into my head.
I went to a wrestling match, and a baseball game broke out.
speaking of photoshop, this new show at the Met, about manipulated photos before digital culture, that works to reconsider what the history of photography means, and about it as a techincal and social as much of an artistic media.
posters and t shirts of world runways.
a variety of school composition books
Alison Brie and Gillian Jacobs in vintage lingerie play at being pin-ups, not only sexy as hell, a genius work of physical comedy, and a pretty great soundtrack,
a dozen or so pics of Rosewell, NM
Roberta Smith's review of the new Ai Wei Wei show is really well written, and works out some of the problems in his practice--it is smart, poltiically aware work, and uses the politics of visual spectacle to elucidate both the problems of China, and the problems of the West's realtionship with China--much of this work is relational, and because we live in the 21st century, relational works in relation to the digital. The question becomes two fold, is his work politics using the rubic of art, art using the rubic of politics, and if it is both--does it function as an aesthetic excercise? The photo work in the 1980s, which was also mentioned by Jerry Saltz, seems to be the beginning of this crisis, are they tourist photos of ny in the 80s, are they an immigrants expereince, are they aping earlier, better ny aesthetics, or are they acts of translation. I think that Wei Wei's best work refuses modernism's art for art's sake, and also the fascile shallowness of much American poltical work, and so by extension, even if it isn't "Great Art" it is vital.
the lost creeks of Edmonton. the lost creeks and rivers of toronto
Federal Prosecutors sue the Bank of America for 1b.
More eccentric Victoriana from Jess Nevins, this time featuring a Robot Ostritch.
Everytime that William Gibson writes about the aesthetics of the future, he adds these tiny prescient details from fields that he really shouldn't follow but does--here he talks about fashion, and has really really smart things to say about McQueen.
Jess Ragan is a typesetter and letter press artist who takes brilliant photos of NY fonts.
Jean Nouvel Carousel under the water of Hurricane Sandy last night.
Zak and Fox are designers and textile artists, this is there pinboard.
Todd Romano photos of a tiny ny apt with glossy navy blue walls
Mike Davis the brilliant socialist critic of cities, talks about the history of LDS' realtionship to social utopias, and their collective forgetting. He is not wrong, and it is one thing that critics of the church miss. The other side, the John Birch, isolaitonist, paleo-con side, now embodied by Glenn Beck, is also not remembered by Romney--and Young's cagey state craft, has elements of both. Their is a tradition in LDS culture that he does embody though, the low key, statist, middle of the road conserative, the willingness to give up Desert for America for example--the kind embodied by Benson under Eisenhower or Hatch or even Mitt's father--this is a tradition that is under written about in his history, and one that Davis, as an excellent critic of statist systems, should have picked up on.
Playable Tetris Pumpkin.
Dave Heaton's review on Kip Moore's new album is a kind of referendum on what his nusic means--smooth with a gorgeous voice, and a commitment to pleasure, the line between a bland genric quality and a smart blankness that reads as universal is difficult to parse, and as much as I like the album, what it means has never really settled into my head.
I went to a wrestling match, and a baseball game broke out.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
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