Munching Sweets

From the Towers

by Heather McHugh

Insanity is not a want of reason.
It is reason's overgrowth, a calculating kudzu.

Explaining why, in two-ton manifesti, thinkers sally forth
with testaments and pipe bombs. Heaven help us:

spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine down or
shower forth, but (for the earthling's sake) ignore
all prayers followed by against, or for. Teach us to bear

life's senselessness, our insignificance, and more;
let's call that sanity. The terrifying prospect isn't some
escapist with a novel, fond of comfort, munching sweets—

it is the busy hermeneut, so serious he's sour, intent on making
meaning of us all, and bursting from the towers to the streets.

Paintings by Hegyusz.

The Disappeared

Up to 30000 people disappeared during the period of dictatorship in Argentina, lasting from 1976 to 1983. The desaparecidos, as they are commonly called (the dictator General Videla infamously said they were "neither alive or dead, but disappeared"), are still a very hot topic in Argentina. Following the political changes, the new democratic government introduced what they called the Ley de Punto Final, which impeded any attempts of legally pursuing the lower-level executioners of the Dirty War - thus, granting them impunity. The law of the Punto Final was voided by the Supreme Court of Argentina in 2005.
The majority of the desaparecidos still remain missing.
What made me enquire into all this was a photographic project called Ausencias ("Absences", 2007) by Gustavo Germano.
Yes, the people who disappear from the photos are cases of the desaparecidos.

1975

Omar Darío Amestoy

Mario Alfredo Amestoy

2006

.

Mario Alfredo Amestoy

---

1970
Maria Irma Ferreira

Maria Susana Ferreira

2006
.

Maria Susana Ferreira

---

1973

Andrés Servín

Raúl María Caire

Luisa Inés Rodríguez

1973

Andrés Servín

.

Luisa Inés Rodríguez

An interview with the artist (in Spanish) can be found at the Argentinian Museum of Memory.

The Song Is You

It might seem innocent.

Yes, this is innocence. It is the purity of what happens when the postmodernisms and the camps and the sooavantgardes have made their statements and played their anti-tunes, and yet, we are still there, trying to listen in to that something special.

Call us romantic. Call us Those Who Couldn't Stand The Progress And Stepped Back.Retrograded, taking the easy way out, exploring the (music's, world's, history's) feedback.

Yet feedback is not the sound that comes back to its source. It is not the echo. It is the echo used as an input.
Thus, what you call feedback is the mere beginning, the source material of the process of creation. As the world comes back crumbling to the imperfection of our ever-childish senses, our feeble gestures, breaking through our inherited self-irony, make things possible. Better, they give us back the light.


Too light? Too naive?
Would you prefer this?


The Gospel was right: The meek shall inherit the Earth. Actually, they've inherited it already. Along with the self-irony, they took what was most precious, and what many deemed lost - the damn aura. Yes, the damn aura still shining and glowing through all the mechanical reproductions. We still want their bloody flesh, we still want to know this is where it's at, right here, between the stage and you, between the song and you.

x x x
All this crossed my mind when watching the brilliant The Song Is You festival at Powiększenie in Warsaw recently.
The song that stayed with me the most was simple.
Here it is:

Do you get it? Beyond the gorgeous lyrics, can you feel how it was, listening to it in the club basement, with the grand piano behind Momus, the lights, the weekend dying away? Or can you imagine it? How different is the song you hear from mine?
More on the festival here. Don't miss tonight (12.03), the last part of the festival, with Kyst and AU.

Kyst

Past Present

Take a look at the pictures by Roger Cremers. The series, which won an award at the 2009 World Press Photo, is called Preserving Memory: Visitors at the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, 30 April-4 May.



No, I will not be writing about how the ever-present cameras turn us into monsters. Or about consumerism versus culture.
What interests me here, to start with, is how we position ourselves in relation to the past.
What is given to us is not merely a luggage - a heritage that is like an object. It is an ever-eroding landscape. And each person has her own map she may or may not use to rebuild it, or rather, to build herself into it.
Watch these bodies. These figures. Watch how they open a dialogue they are not aware of. Watch how they become, that's it, a sign.
Maybe the most dramatic is the last one, the young man lying on the ground, his hands close to his face. Forget his camera. Now, what do you see?
Or maybe the most dramatic is the first, black figure, that is watching birds through binoculars, or a plane, or he could almost be shouting a friendly greeting to someone standing on the roof... were it not the seemingly anonymous bricks behind him. Were it not our maps. And now, with your map, what do you see? Who is hitting him? Shooting?
Or rather, what is he, what are they protecting themselves against?

What makes a sign a sign?
When does it signify, lead to the signified? How does the arrow gain its shape? How is it born?
How much of these vectors is rooted in us so deeply, we spell it out with every word, unknowingly?

Take this much less spectacular project by William Boling, called Never Gone. Boling took photographs of the places in Atlanta where the Battle of Atlanta occurred in July 1864.





So what makes a sign a sign?
When does it signify, lead to the signified? How does the arrow gain its shape? How is it born?
How much of these vectors is rooted in us so deeply, we spell it out with every word, unknowingly?

How To Win An Art Contest In One Easy Step

Make one.
Tom Polo created the 2009 B.E.S.T. Contemporary Art Prize for Painting contest. The criteria were typical of the art contests we know. Except for one small point, which stated:
eligible entrants are artists born on the 1st February, 1985 and named as 'Tommaso Polo' on their birth certificates.
The exhibition of the finalists (guess who?) is taking place at the MOP gallery in Sydney.
The winning work, by - you guessed it - Tom Polo, is called Continuous One Liners (Young People Today).Possibly many of my dear readers are thinking, we've had similar ideas, but they were too childish to execute. Maybe the most seductive part of tricksters is that by putting to life the silliness we only imagine (or think we imagined), they at once make it more serious and much more ridiculous.
You can find an interview with the artist at The Art Life.
Why B.E.S.T.? Because Everybody Still Tries.

Anonymous. 3 works by Armin Rohr

I can't get these pictures out of my head.
Especially the last one is mesmerizing. Is it peaceful? Mysterious? Haunting? Creepy? Brutal?
The mass in the first two paintings that makes up a threatening, or at least disquieting block, is here replaced by three distinct figures. The space is neither claustrophobic, as in the first one, nor agoraphobic, as could be claimed about the second (notice the ceiling moving up above the horizontal line that "closes" the picture). In the third picture, the space is abstract. It is the water we often feel is the closest to the sky. So what's the matter? Maybe it's the skyish space combined with the strokes, the juicy, dripping pinks that get feverish in the center? Maybe it's the unfaceness of these faces? The ghost should be ephemeral, translucid. Yet here, the ghosts are opaque. They are thick with body. And moving in.

All works are by Armin Rohr, found on his blog.

If You Want To Cry

...cry to this.

My Mother, My Son by Mary Frey

And another one, less obvious, but no less gorgeous - Bathroom Landscape:

Every once in a while the question comes back lurking: are there things that are not to be shown? Or rather: not to be worked at? Do you imagine this - a woman standing in the room with a camera, waiting for the right moment so she can take a picture of her son carrying her mother? Hold her up just a bit honey... Just a little more...
And yet, this is one of the most touching pictures I have seen in quite a while.

(via)

Zoonoia

From the crazy guys at Koerner Union comes the most original dog portrait of 2008:

...and the most unappealing digital album of 2007 - Ready Made. Which is also an accomplishment of sorts.

In A Sentimental Mood

Sonnet 44
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But, ah, thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that, so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend time's leisure with my moan,
Receiving nought by elements so slow,
But heavy tears, badges of either's woe.

(Shakespeare)

One more thing: The bone in the film is a wishbone:

The wishbone, known in anatomy as the furcula, is a sternum bone found in birds which is shaped like the letter Y. It is used as an attachment point for the wing muscles. It is so named because of a tradition: Two people pull on each side of such a bone, and when it breaks, the one who gets the larger part is said to have a wish granted.

The mechanical sculpture in the film is by Arthur Ganson. Some of his stuff is really awe-inspiring. Check this Machine with Artichoke Petal #2



Of course, it may bring to mind other art machines (Rebecca Horn, but also manyothers), but what I really appreciate here is the simplicity. Modest art is something to be cherished. It also reminds me of some of the musical experiences by the Portuguese musician Nuno Rebelo:


Even the really simple ones are really something: Machine with Chinese Fan


Is it kitsch? I don't care.
(via)

Workingg

Just so you don't think I'm ignoring you - check out some great projects by Marc Kremers:

• As found, a site with images found on the net... Fantastic.
• The wonderfuly anarchist Tex Server.
• And some of Marc's animations can be found here.

The right and the rights

So how was it for YOU?

Not all of Robert Grigolov's work convinces me. Some of it seems like simple tricks pour épater les bourgeois. But isn't part of the fun about discovering the value something has for you when taking out of a context which isn't necessarily one you appreciate?

Why does the above installation have the title Dollar Bill? I don't know. I have some ideas, but I don't think I want to follow them. And, just as Daniel Pennac's 10 Inalienable Rights of the Reader, so any spectator has similar rights, among them, to decide arbitrarily where the work begins and ends for her.


This doesn't need to mean any sort of glorification of ignorance. However, it does accept it as part of the deal. After all, the spectator is no less free than the artist, is he?


This should be a very obvious question. Aesthetic relativism is something seemingly accepted. Yet the contemporary art world seems to specialize in "right" ways of looking at its creations.
Anything goes - yet there is still plenty of exciting space for dialogue. Tastes are indeed something we discuss and shape, aesthetic experience is a beautifuly shapeable thing. And yet one of the most difficult things is to stay within the play of common value-seeking and exploration of personal experience, and not move into the discourse of competence, the universe of authority, which might sustain a big chunk of what the contemporary art world is about, but is hardly enjoyable for those of us who like their artflesh stupendously raw and intimate.
(via)

Watch your back

Oh what jealousy of the physical difference! Of the outcasting cast out in flesh! Oh how simple the definitions then become. How meaningful in their ever-presence. What sort of a tragedy can there be when its shape is nothing? How do you give it shape? How do you translate it into something it is not?

All pictures are by Risk Hazekamp.

Art after commerce

Here's a recent work made by Julius Popp, a German artist:



And here's a commercial product present since 1989:


Classic questions:
How much of the value is the originality of the project?
How much is there left for the concept? The execution? The richness of the universe that is being created? The "art codes"?
The bluff?
Should one stop/diverge a project upon realizing one is following another's path too closely?
This latter question is quite recurrent among many of the artists I know. Some opt for stopping, while others simply don't let go of their toy. After all, they say, isn't it always mine in the first place? Unintentional plagiarism? So what? If you focus on what you are, on your own path, shouldn't it always lead to an original work? In the best of possible worlds?

The Wild Things Are In Forts

Some of my favorites from the Wild Things' Forts contest by Booooom, where you can send in your picture of a fort....
Here's the explanation:

Where The Wild Things Are is filled with references to building a world out of things from your everyday life and that’s exactly what we want you to do!

We want you to create a fort! Use garbage bags, tree branches, tablecloths, prosthetic limbs, wood, gold, whatever you got!

Snap a photo, and email it to me, here.

Winner gets a “Wild Things” Edition XBOX plus a magnificent bus shelter-sized Where the Wild Things Are poster not available in stores!

Contest ends next Monday (October 12th), so get on it!

Note To Self

Found here via here.

It's All About You

Audience by Chris O'Shea. A very interesting technical description can be found here.

Blu Going Further

in collaboration with David Ellis.

COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) from blu on Vimeo.

The Expecting Creator Of Matter

Watch the edges; yet another birth, another coming-to, another attempt at elucidation, lucid, try lucidity, for a change, just watch the edges, and also, try to aim at the opaque, but where's the opaque in the translucid, and how, how does it


Elucidation: an act of explaining that serves to clear up and cast light on. The splendid, harsh ambiguity of words, the clustering of them, the annoying coming-to, they do not leave us they do not, they do not leave us, an act of explaining, take that, an act, ex-plain, serves, clear, clear up, cast, cast, cast, light. On.






And as it is happening, you watch it take shape, this thing, this event, this work, this thing-in-work-in-process, which is you in the stupidest of senses, you have been feeding it and yes, you were the, the ur-text, but what with it, the bone, the rib, the biblical Eve, so clearly not you, going elsewhere, as you watch


All works by Loris Cecchini.

After a conversation with AB

Apparently, the National Railway Workers installed a handrail on Richard Serra’s sculpture in Duedingen, Switzerland. Why would anyone want the autonomy of the artist?

(via)

Polly Morgan's choir

What is this choir of possibilities you offer me? Where can it take us? What tragic song may be ours, what sort of future may a non-future contain? Then again, isn't it just a question of measure? Stop here. Stop here. The still. The gesture, frozen, with the impossible life no less possible than any other still. Still. Hold it more gently. Don't make your hand into a fist. Let them be flowers, let them be flowers, singing flowers, watching singing flowers, for just another, for just another still.

You can purchase this exclusive Polly Morgan print at murmurart. If you dare hang this on a wall.