photo/art/life

Picasso's Blue Period

2012-01-29T16:24:00.002-05:00

images

Antony Hegarty

2012-01-24T21:42:00.001-05:00

art info on performance at MOMA and Hammer exhibit

Robert Motherwell

2012-01-23T16:54:00.002-05:00

franz kline

2012-01-23T16:48:00.001-05:00

Soft Money

2011-12-30T10:25:00.002-05:00

by Rae Armantrout

They're sexy

because they're needy,
which degrades them.

They're sexy because
they don't need you.

They're sexy because they pretend
not to need you,

but they're lying,
which degrades them.

They're beneath you
and it's hot.

They're across the border,
rhymes with dancer —

they don't need
to understand.

They're content to be
(not mean),

which degrades them
and is sweet.

They want to be
the thing-in-itself

and the thing-for-you —

Miss Thing —

but can't.

They want to be you,
but can't,

which is so hot.

going around

2011-12-29T19:03:00.001-05:00

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” —Douglas Adams

Matthias Dornfeld

2011-12-29T18:59:00.001-05:00

Found

Julienne Hsu

2011-12-29T18:36:00.003-05:00

Julienne-Hsu

Sigmar Polke

2011-12-25T19:31:00.002-05:00

Sigmar Polke (13 February 1941 – 10 June 2010) was a German painter and photographer.

Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matter and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. In the last 20 years of his life, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them.

I said

2011-12-22T17:08:00.001-05:00

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you...I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith / But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting...So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing." - T.S. Eliot

painting / photography

2011-12-11T10:52:00.001-05:00

“By placing paint on photographs, with all their random and involuntary expressiveness, Gerhard Richter reinforces the unique aspect of each of these mediums and opens a field of tension rich in paradoxes, as old as the couple – painting / photography – which has largely defined modern art.”

commit

2011-12-10T14:05:00.000-05:00

“One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is idiocy.”
- Gerhard Richter

I am wild

2011-11-07T20:48:00.000-05:00

“Wildness has no conditions, no sure routes, no peaks or goals, no source that is not instantly becoming something more than itself, then letting go of that, always becoming. It cannot be stripped to its complexity by cat scan or telescope. Rather, it is a many-pointed truth, almost a bluntness, a sudden essence like the wild strawberries strung along the ground on scarlet runners under my feet. Wildness is source and fruition at once, as if every river circled round, the mouth eating the tail—and the tail, the source…”

There is no purpose, other than itself, to wildness. It is both “source and fruition,” the mingling of cause and effect in circular logic. What Ehrlich calls wildness, call a network of vital life, an outpouring of a nearly mechanic force that seeks only to enlarge itself, and that pushes its disequilibrium into all matter, erupting in creatures and machines alike.

Wildness/life is always becoming, Ehrlich says. Becoming what? Becoming becoming. Life is on its way to further complications, further deepness and mystery, further processes of becoming and change. Life is circle of becoming, an autocatalytic set, inflaming itself with its own sparks, breeding upon itself more life and more wildness and more “becomingness.” Life has no conditions, no moments that are not instantly becoming something more than life itself.

As Ehrlich hints, wild life resembles that strange loop of the Uroboros biting its tail, consuming itself. But in truth, wild life is the far stranger loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly larger mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.”
— Gretel Ehrlich,

chaos/order

2011-11-07T18:33:00.002-05:00

“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
— Douglas R. Hofstadter

q

2011-11-07T18:18:00.001-05:00

“If you wish to understand the secrets of the Universe, think of energy, frequency, and vibration.”
— Nikola Tesla

q

2011-11-02T21:15:00.001-04:00

"In my beginning is my end." -T.S. Elliot

fragments of RGB

2011-10-11T20:18:00.001-04:00

We became interested in the observer’s personal view and in »re-projecting« this. The installation reacted to and changed with the viewer’s movement and, hence, his perspective and point of view. The illusion of a LED screen was destroyed and the RGB elements dissolved to form new, translated images and, thus, a transformed »reality«. Beside the installation that illustrates the sensitive interaction between person and image, »fragments of RGB« is also intended as a photographic series in which the transformations that occurred on the display were consciously photographed, whereby the effect of alienation was intensified in the design process. onformative

wolves

2011-09-24T09:19:00.000-04:00

embodied in the object

2011-09-23T14:36:00.003-04:00

The artist has his problems and thinks as he works. But his thought is more immediately embodied in the object...The artist does his thinking in the very qualitative media he works in and the terms lie so close to the object that he is producing that they merge directly into it.

Dewey

tension

2011-09-23T14:33:00.001-04:00

Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of and because of tension.
Dewey

falling out

2011-09-23T14:24:00.004-04:00

Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it--either through effort or by some happy chance. And in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistence through which it has successfully passed...life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives.
Dewey

Order

2011-09-23T14:23:00.000-04:00

Order cannot but be admirable in a world constantly threatened with disorder--in a world where living creatures can go on living only by taking advantage of whatever order exists about them, incorporating it into themselves. In a world like ours, every living creature that attains sensibility welcomes order with a response of harmonious feeling whenever it finds a congruous order about it.

For only when an organism shares in the ordered relations of its environment does it secure the stability essential to living. And when the participation comes after a phase of disruption and conflict, it bears within itself the germs of a consummation akin to the esthetic.

. . .Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake, but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. . .

Dewey

What do Artists Know?

2011-09-14T07:19:00.002-04:00

Beyond a wide range of material practices, histories and techniques, concepts and theoretical frameworks, artists are trained to use a unique set of skills, process, and methodologies.

These include:

- Synthesizing diverse facts, goals, and references–making connections and speaking many “languages”. Artists are very “lateral” in their research and operations and have great intellectual and operational agility.

- Production of new knowledge as evidenced by the 100+year history of innovation and originality as a top criterion

- Creative, in-process problem solving and ongoing processes, not all up-front creativity: responsiveness.

- Artists compose and perform, initiate and carry-through, design and execute. This creates a relatively tight “feedback loop” in their process.

- Pro-active not re-active practice: artists are trained to initiate, re-direct the brief, and consider their intentionality.

- Acute cognizance of individual responsibility for the meanings, ramifications and consequences of their work. (The downside of this is that artists are not always team-oriented or willing to compromise due to the high premium placed on individual responsibility and sole authorship.)

- Understanding of the language of cultural values and how they are embodied and represented – re-valuation and re-contextualization.

- Participation and maneuvering in non-compensation (social) economies, idea economies, and other intangible values (capital).

- Proficiency in evaluation and analysis along multiple-criteria--qualitative lines, qualitative assessment. Many are skilled in pattern and system recognition, especially with asymmetrical data.

- Making explicit the implicit -- making visible the invisible. r Artists do not think outside the box-- there is no box.

Frances Whitehead Art 21

Albert Oehlen

2011-09-10T10:09:00.003-04:00

Looking into other artists who paint with their hands (use their bodies as instrument)Esp. interested in Oehlen beacuse he has been painting with his hands and has ties to abstract expressionism.

Lucio Fontana

2011-09-02T11:40:00.002-04:00

Lucio Fontana (19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was an Italian-Argentinian painter and sculptor. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera

More Pollock

2011-08-25T07:12:00.002-04:00

Spent a good amount of time with Lavender Mist yesterday at The National Gallery of Art.

Carl Marin

2011-08-25T07:09:00.001-04:00

Hoping to see this tomorrow when I spend the day in Phillywww.thefluxspace.org

quote

2011-08-23T09:42:00.001-04:00

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
Jackson Pollock

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.
Jackson Pollock

love

2011-08-15T23:19:00.001-04:00

slid apart

2011-08-15T23:16:00.001-04:00

"In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment? "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You)

Dexter Dalwood

2011-08-15T20:31:00.001-04:00

Dexter Dalwood, Burroughs in Tangiers, 2005.

Dexter Dalwood’s paintings reconstructed historical and literary scenes as imagined by the artist. The collage-like painting Burroughs in Tangiers,constructs a space for the Beat Generation writer to work – a manic space, like the literary figure himself.

Black Rain

2011-08-14T10:25:00.000-04:00

Black Rain from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Working with STEREO scientists, Semiconductor collected all the HI image data to date, revealing the journey of the satellites from their initial orientation, to their current tracing of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Solar wind, CME's, passing planets and comets orbiting the sun can be seen as background stars and the milky way pass by.

...they work with raw scientific satellite data which has not yet been cleaned and processed for public consumption. By embracing the artifacts, calibration and phenomena of the capturing process we are reminded of the presence of the human observer who endeavors to extend our perceptions and knowledge through technological innovation.

Alice Anderson

2011-08-11T07:28:00.002-04:00

Her Website

Vicki DaSilva

2011-08-10T12:34:00.000-04:00

...awakens the static photograph and illuminates iconography that normally only “goes bump” in the night. Exhibiting studio and sight-specific shots, DaSilva presents playful surface spaces as well as rhetorical images by juxtaposing two styles of light photography: painting and graffiti.

Found at White Hot

Ascension/Immersion

2011-08-07T21:50:00.001-04:00

This too. Wish I could find a clip to record here.

Mary Coble and Blithe Riley’s collaborative 2009 video, Ascension/Immersion shows a solo performer (Coble) slowly climbing into and out of a decaying spring house. Using a split screen, the video allows viewers to simultaneously watch as Coble drops through a hole into a standing pool of water and at the same time labors to climb out through a hole onto the roof. The repetition of these duel acts becomes a Sisyphean performance of internal/external rhythms and endurance.

Patty Chang

2011-08-07T21:41:00.001-04:00

Another piece I loved:

pattychang.com

Patty Chang’s video Losing Ground, 2000, depicts Chang in a white shirt, business-like skirt, and heels, on a lawn that is rolling uncontrollably beneath her. As Chang tries to walk through her suburban surroundings she lurches, lunges, and falls. The viewer is left to wonder if she has lost her balance and stability or if the world around her is quaking out of control.

Janine Antoni

2011-08-07T21:32:00.000-04:00

Touch

originality

2011-08-06T10:06:00.000-04:00

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees..., clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "it's not where you take things from - its where you take them to."
-Jim Jarmusch

Gifs/internet galleries

2011-08-06T10:04:00.001-04:00

Thinking about an exhibit I saw last night at Artisphere of animated gifs. Repetition is a Form of Change

Which got me researching and led me to this Great online exhibit: bubblebyte
Esp. love: Jaime Martinez

seize its material for itself

2011-08-04T15:25:00.000-04:00

“The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways, but without material from the external world it is powerless, and unlike the sausage machine it must seize its material for itself, since events only become experiences through the interest we take in them; if they do not interest us, we are making nothing of them.

The man, therefore, whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and recombined into beautiful and instructive patterns.”

— Bertrand Russell

How the brain constructs

2011-08-01T16:49:00.001-04:00

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain neuroscientist David Eagleman:

As we want to go on this journey of exploring what the heck we’re made out of, the first thing to do is to recognize that what you’re seeing out there is not actually reality. You’re not sort of opening your eyes, and voila, there’s the world. Instead, your brain constructs the world. Your brain is trapped in darkness inside of your skull, and all it ever sees are electrical and chemical signals. So all the colors you see, and so on, that doesn’t really exist; that’s an interpretation by your brain. (…)

All we’re actually doing is seeing an internal model of the world; we’re not seeing what’s out there, we’re seeing just our internal model of it. And that’s why, when you move your eyes around, all you’re doing is updating that model.

And for that matter, when you blink your eyes and there are 80 milliseconds of blackness there, you don’t notice that, either. Because it’s not actually about what’s coming in the eyes; it’s about your internal construction. And, in fact, as I mention in the book, we don’t even need our eyes to see. When you are asleep and dreaming, your eyes are closed, but you’re having full, rich visual experience —because it’s the same process of running your visual cortex, and then you believe that you are seeing. (…)

And so, it turns out what the brain is really good at—and the cortex in particular —is in extracting information that has some sort of useful correlation with things in the outside world. And so, if you feed, let’s say, visual input into your ears, you will figure out how to see through your ears. Because the brain doesn’t care how it gets there; all it cares about is, Oh, there’s structure to this data that I can extract. (…)

I think it’s sort of the most amazing thing about the way brains are built, is they’re constantly reconfiguring their own circuitry. (…)

It turns out that one of the main jobs of the brain is to save energy; and the way that it does this is by predicting what is going to come next. And if it sort of has a pretty good prediction of what’s happening next, then it doesn’t need to burn a lot of energy when that thing happens, because it’s already foreseen it. (…)

So, the job of the brain is to figure out what’s coming next; and if you have successfully done it, then there’s no point in consciousness being a part of what’s going on. (…)
Time perception

You’re not passively just watching the river of time flow by. Instead, just like with visual illusions, your brain is actively constructing time. (…)

When you can predict something, not only does your consciousness not come
online, but it feels like it goes very fast. So, driving to work is very fast; but the very first time you did it, it seemed to take very long time. And it’s because of the novelty and the amount of energy you had to burn the first time you did it—
before you were able to predict it.

Essentially what prediction means, if it’s something you’re doing a lot, is that
you’re actually reconfiguring the circuitry of the brain. You’re actually getting
stuff down into the circuitry, which gives you speed and efficiency, but at the cost
of conscious access. (…)

It’s not only the way we see vision and time, but it’s all of our cognition: it’s our morals, it’s what we’re attracted to, it’s what we believe in. All of these things are served up from these subterranean caverns of the mind. We often don’t have any access to what’s going on down there, and why we believe the things we do, why we act the way we do. (…)

The “illusion of truth”

You give people statements to rate the truth value of, and then you bring them back a while later and you give them more statements to say whether they’re true or false, and so on. But it turns out that if you repeat some of the statements from the first time to the second time, just because the people have heard them before, whether or not it’s true and whether or not they even marked it as false last time, because they’re hearing it again— unconsciously they know they’ve heard it before—they’re more likely to rate it as true now. (…)

So, the way your brain ends up in the end is a very complicated tangle of genetics and environment. And environment includes, not only all of your childhood experiences and so on, but your in utero environment, toxins in the air, the things that you eat, experiences of abuse, and all of that stuff—and your culture; your culture has a lot to do with the way your brain gets wired up. (…)

Team of Rivals

One of the culminating issues in the book is that your brain is really like a team of rivals, where you have these different neural subpopulations that are always battling it out to control the one-output channel of your behavior; and you’ve got all these different networks that are fighting it out. And so, there are parts of your brain that can be xenophobic, and other parts of your brain that maybe decide to overwrite that, and they’re not xenophobic. And I think this gives us a much more nuanced view, in the end, of who we are, and also who other people are. (…)

A neural parliament

But, in fact, you are many people. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” So, I think this gives us a better view of ourselves, and it also tells us ways to set up our own behavior to become the kind of people we want to be, by thinking about how to structure things in our life so that the short-term parties that are interested in instant impulse gratification—so that they don’t always win the battle.”

David Eagleman on Brain Science Podcast

Jackson Pollock

2011-07-31T12:24:00.001-04:00

"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

-- Jackson Pollock, My Painting, 1956

controllable and uncontrollable factors
His technique combined the movement of his body, over which he had control, the viscous flow of paint, the force of gravity, and the absorption of paint into the canvas. It was a mixture of controllable and uncontrollable factors. Flinging, dripping, pouring, and spattering, he would move energetically around the canvas, almost as if in a dance, and would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see.

Fractals
Studies by Taylor, Micolich and Jonas have examined Pollock's technique and have determined that some works display the properties of mathematical fractals.[19] They assert that the works become more fractal-like chronologically through Pollock's career.[20] The authors even speculate that Pollock may have had an intuition of the nature of chaotic motion, and attempted to form a representation of mathematical chaos, more than ten years before "Chaos Theory" itself was proposed. Other experts[21] suggest that Pollock may have merely imitated popular theories of the time in order to give his paintings a depth not previously seen.

positive and negative
Pollock’s finest paintings… reveal that his all-over line does not give rise to positive or negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas demands to be read as figure, whether abstract or representational, against another part of the canvas read as ground. There is not inside or outside to Pollock’s line or the space through which it moves…. Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas.(Karmel 132)

V.S. Ramachandran: Neurology and the Passion for Art

2011-07-31T11:23:00.001-04:00

"Why is it that great works of art seem to have a universal appeal, transcending cultural and geographic boundaries?

40/40 Vision Lecture: Neurology and the Passion for Art
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Labyrinth

2011-07-31T10:49:00.001-04:00

The labyrinth at the island of Blå Jungfrun, Sweden

collages of self

2011-07-28T15:07:00.000-04:00

“We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck.

What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (and that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with). Although my meteorite metaphor may make it sound as if we are victims of random bombardment, I don’t mean to suggest that we willingly accrete just any old mannerism onto our sphere’s surface – we are very selective, usually borrowing traits that we admire or covet – but even our style of selectivity is itself influenced over the years by what we have turned into as a result of our repeated accretions.

And what was once right on the surface gradually becomes buried like a Roman ruin, growing closer and closer to the core of us as our radius keeps increasing. All of this suggests that each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way. But of course not all contributors are represented equally. Those whom we love and who love us are the most strongly represented inside us, and our “I” is formed by a complex collusion of all their influences echoing down the many years.”
— Douglas Hofstadter, American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics, cited in Martine Rothblatt, Can We Develop and Test Machine Minds and Uploads Ethically?, IEET, Apr 24, 2011.

nature

2011-07-28T14:23:00.000-04:00

“This universe seems, in some sense, to be a living, evolving, adapting universe that utilizes information to organize itself and to create ever increasing levels of complexity. We are a part of it and cannot be separated from it and are interconnected with it all. Furthermore it appears to be a self referencing system. As nature learns, habits form and those that lead to useful outcomes solidify and effectively become “hard coded”. Even then these “habits of nature” (including us) adapt and evolve by trial and error as change occurs.

It appears that nature has bootstrapped itself not only into existence but has evolved itself into the current state of complexity that we now observe all around us. Most astounding of all is that humankind has evolved to the point that we can ask questions and have begun to gain understanding fundamental to natures very existence. Perhaps, then, we and all sentient beings really are one of natures way of knowing about and experiencing itself. Not only that, in some sense, we seem to be able to influence its very evolution.”
— Edgar Mitchell, American pilot, engineer, and astronaut, Robert Staretz, The Quantum Hologram And the Nature of Consciousness, Journal of Cosmology, 2011, Vol. 14.

Explorer of the World

2011-07-25T20:33:00.000-04:00

time

2011-07-25T15:30:00.000-04:00

A person experiences life as something separated from the rest -
a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this self-imposed prison,and through compassion, to find the reality of Oneness.
- Albert Einstein

The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness;
and knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.
- Khalil Gibran

cycle

2011-07-22T09:06:00.001-04:00

That is why the nature of my sculpture is not fixed and finished, processes continue in most of them: chemical reactions, fermentations, color changes, decay, drying up. Everything is in a state of change."_ Beuys

Social sculpture

2011-07-22T08:38:00.000-04:00

Social sculpture is a specific example of the extended concept of art, that was advocated by the conceptual artist and politician Joseph Beuys. Beuys created the term Social Sculpture to illustrate his idea of art's potential to transform society. As an artwork it includes human activity, that strives to structure and shape society or the environment. The central idea of a social sculptor is an artist, who creates structures in society using language, thought, action, and object.

Beuys believed everybody was an artist, he once said “every sphere of human activity, Even peeling a potato can be a work of art as long as it is a conscious act.” The idea being that every decision you make should be thought out and attempt to make or contribute to a work of art which in the end is society. Individuality and well educated decisions are promoted in the person while the government is made of those decisions put into referendums. This point of view invites followers to humble themselves by realizing that they are an important part of a whole not only an individual.[7]

Falke Pisano

2011-07-20T09:58:00.001-04:00

"Continental philosophy has no doubt been a major influence for many contemporary practitioners – Derridian and Deleuzean axioms are standard fare in exhibition literature. But in the case of Falke Pisano, theoretical discourse does not frame her practice - it is the work itself. Written text, spoken word, lectures, or videos overlaid with monologues she writes and reads herself, form an ongoing project she refers to as ‘Figures of Speech.’ In this she sets out to examine translations between formal, physical and linguistic registers; essentially, an examination of the nature of things. What is a thing in the first instance? The glossary of her Christoph Keller book sets this concept out as being ‘interchangeable with entity or being,’ including ‘events, propositions, properties and relations, not just material in nature.’ Pisano postulates the ontological instability of things within the encounter between subject and object and does so through language as the site where materiality, form, description and agency convene."

the rest

expanding balloon

2011-07-17T19:41:00.000-04:00

There are many misconceptions surrounding the Big Bang theory. For example, we tend to imagine a giant explosion. Experts however say that there was no explosion; there was (and continues to be) an expansion. Rather than imagining a balloon popping and releasing its contents, imagine a balloon expanding: an infinitesimally small balloon expanding to the size of our current universe.

Another misconception is that we tend to image the singularity as a little fireball appearing somewhere in space. According to the many experts however, space didn't exist prior to the Big Bang. Back in the late '60s and early '70s, when men first walked upon the moon, "three British astrophysicists, Steven Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose turned their attention to the Theory of Relativity and its implications regarding our notions of time. In 1968 and 1970, they published papers in which they extended Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to include measurements of time and space.1, 2 According to their calculations, time and space had a finite beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy."3 The singularity didn't appear in space; rather, space began inside of the singularity. Prior to the singularity, nothing existed, not space, time, matter, or energy - nothing. So where and in what did the singularity appear if not in space? We don't know. We don't know where it came from, why it's here, or even where it is. All we really know is that we are inside of it and at one time it didn't exist and neither did we.

singularity

2011-07-17T19:33:00.001-04:00

According to the standard theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago. What is a "singularity" and where does it come from? Well, to be honest, we don't know for sure. Singularities are zones which defy our current understanding of physics. They are thought to exist at the core of "black holes." Black holes are areas of intense gravitational pressure. The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density (a mathematical concept which truly boggles the mind). These zones of infinite density are called "singularities." Our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense, something - a singularity. Where did it come from? We don't know. Why did it appear? We don't know.

After its initial appearance, it apparently inflated (the "Big Bang"), expanded and cooled, going from very, very small and very, very hot, to the size and temperature of our current universe. It continues to expand and cool to this day and we are inside of it: incredible creatures living on a unique planet, circling a beautiful star clustered together with several hundred billion other stars in a galaxy soaring through the cosmos, all of which is inside of an expanding universe that began as an infinitesimal singularity which appeared out of nowhere for reasons unknown. This is the Big Bang theory.

Big Bang Theory

Lee Ufan

2011-07-12T13:31:00.001-04:00

From Point And From Line

Eitan Buchalter, Shutter Door 70cms

2011-07-12T10:39:00.000-04:00

Eitan Buchalter, Shutter Door 70cms from this is tomorrow on Vimeo.

Eitan Buchalter

2011-07-12T10:27:00.002-04:00

"Conveyor lasted thirty minutes at the Tate Modern, London. I remained stationary and maintained eye contact with those who ascended the fifth floor escalator."

His website

Quotes from video below

2011-07-11T17:09:00.002-04:00

"We are all ghosts of another time and another time to come."

"We are all steadily heading towards death."

We keep going...People keep being produced... are we on repeat.. relentless cycle...unending machinelike churning out of stories and individuals and to what end. completely unknown. I guess I'm trying to organize it for myself.

Taryn Simon

2011-07-11T17:04:00.001-04:00

this is a review

2011-07-11T14:13:00.001-04:00

Tony Tasset: Judy
Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte
541 W 23rd St., New York, NY 10011
May 12 through June 18, 2011

In the small Leo Koenig Inc. Projeckte space, a film projector sits atop of what appears to be the crate it was shipped in. It casts an image of a woman’s face on the far wall opposite from the entrance to the space, which has been covered with solid black tarps to shut out all daylight. A 15 second edit of 35mm film runs in a loop, and the woman has her gaze set into the camera. Light blond hair falls unto her shoulders, which are covered by a light blue t-shirt. She is framed by a bush of what appears to be powder-pink roses in a field of lush green foliage. A lone earring of some modest gem dangles from her exposed ear, the ear that holds back a lock of hair. She flashes a gentle smile, in a demure manner, which seems to come from some radiant joy that she just can’t keep in, although she seems to try for a moment. Light crow’s feet form in the outer corners of her eyes. She blinks. Our gaze slowly and steadily zooms onto her face through the camera. The smile fades from her mouth, she blinks a few times, and casts her face down into a pensive, inward gaze. The camera moves in closer, a lock of her hair gently blows across her chin, and the flowers around her head are dancing, steadily moving out of the frame. The sober, wistful look suddenly seems to take a darker turn into what appears to be grief. For just a moment, she looks so awfully sad. The camera is still moving in, flowers move out of the frame, and a wrinkle on her brow forms. She lifts her head, blinks, her brow is furrowed, and she casts her gaze, which appears to have grown cold, back into the camera. The corners of her mouth are slightly turned upward, a sort of smile, but not one that is inviting. Her mouth is twisted into a subtle grimace that seems to communicate a smoldering anger. The edit cuts and starts over again. The smile, which is back on her face, is not too far away from the grimace in its form, but the rest of her face is light and open again. Lovely pink flowers fill the edges of the frame. The smile fades, her face turns down, the lock of hair moves across her chin in the breeze, sadness and grief appear, and then give way to anger. She lifts her head with furrowed brow and grimace, she blinks, and the edit cuts back to her smiling, with the frame full of flowers. The scene loops and loops, repeating into a hypnotic spell. The slow and steady zoom correlating with the changing display of emotion across her face, produces an unsettling effect. It takes watching the edit loop a few times to work through some confusion and feel certain that it is the same footage repeating, and not subtly different shots edited together.

This is a beautiful woman. With the range of emotions playing and repeating across her face, she conveys a sense of knowingness, strength, and, for a loss of any other word, love. These complexities of emotion that show themselves on her face in this short clip are engaging and keep me transfixed. Something about her image, which is moving in the light projected onto the wall, is almost physical. Her lock of hair gently moves under her chin, the flowers around her head dance for a moment before leaving the frame, while it occurs to me the sound of the projector in this empty space is overwhelming. The clicking of the gears, and the sound of the cooling fan are loud and unrelenting. I look at the projector, which is matter-of-factly placed on what appears to be the crate it was shipped to the gallery in. The tenuous ribbon of film moves through the mechanism between the two reels. The still frames, 24 per second, are illuminated through light into her moving face on the wall. Her face in the projected image shows some wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, along her brow, and at the corners of her mouth. Like every one of us, this woman is aging. Vertical lines, which reveal aging of the physical strip of film, dance around nervously in the projected moving image on the wall. The powder-pink flowers blowing gently in the breeze behind her head are in full-bloom, most likely late in the summer. Autumn will come. Their petals will begin to fall a few at a time, then more rapidly. They will die, as will the woman whose complex and lovely face casts it gaze upon me through the film. And the film itself will disintegrate. Unlike the digital image, which seems to have the potential for eternal facsimile, the images generated by light passing though film have, like us, a certain temporal existence. Not only will the flowers die, not only will this woman, who is revealing such an intimate range of emotion die, but this moving image will die as well. As we all will. For just a moment, I feel I may be in love with her. With some more sober distance from this work, I come to my senses and realize it is actually the work I have fallen in love with, and the almost drunken melancholic realization that we will eventually be separated from all we love through death. This is the tragedy, which communicates through every frame of this film.

I don’t know this woman, but there is something familiar about her face, or rather the narrative of emotions that play out on it. Her face, with all of its ever so subtle nuanced series of gestures, takes up most of the shot, which is projected at approximately 8x10 feet. It is the intensely intimate, up and close view I have of her, that is conjuring familiarity. It is not this woman’s face I have seen before, but rather, a similar likeness of gestures when engaged in a brief moment of intimacy with the woman I love. The camera has penetrated the boundaries, which are usually let down for the one we are most intimate with. I learn this woman, Judy, whose name adorns the title of this exhibition, is the artist Judy Ledgerwood, and is also Tony Tasset’s wife. This information lends itself to the feeling that the emotion I am reading on her face is not scripted and directed- as it might be if she were an actor, but is documentation of a real event. It is just as likely that Tasset is documenting an actual moment of intimacy between his wife and himself, as it is something staged, or likely it is something in between.

This moment that has been documented is reminiscent of similar sweet and fleeting moments I have experienced that make themselves apparent in memory, with an arbitrary disregard for any type of logic. Unlike the random and fleeting nature of memory, this repetition expands its effect, while mimicking it. Along with the fact that the medium of film is deteriorating as Judy is, there is something about the medium of film that feels as though it is not so far removed from the real experience. In On Photography, Susan Sontag’s description of the photographic image as being, “not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a deathmask” (Sontag, p. 154), resonates here. That which is beautiful about this work is rendered uncanny through the medium. Unlike the digitized image, this image is produced by light passing through a physical object. An object in decay, which reveals its decay as its life plays out before us.

I am more familiar with Tasset’s other work, particularly his sculptures and photographs. I’ve always responded to his humor and wit, which he employs in trompe l'oeil sculptures such as Cherry Tree, 1999, Magnolias for Pittsburgh, 2006, his Smashed Pumpkin, 2008 or Rotting Pumpkin, 2006. These works were fabricated to scale as the real object and look deceptively like the actual object they each represent, particularly the Magnolias for Pittsburgh, 2006, which are two hand-painted bronze magnolia trees installed in a grove of actual magnolia trees. He conjures the sensibilities of a trickster in many of these objects, and at times, or at least one, he plays with blatant adolescent potty humor in his 1994 cibachrome photograph, I Peed In My Pants. This life-scaled photograph bears the likeness of Tasset, standing in a puddle of his own urine, wearing a pair of off-white khaki’s, which offer no possible concealment of the fact that yes, Mr. Tasset did, in fact, pee in his pants. He stands posed as the proud, heroic artist, with arms crossed over his chest and a deadpan look on his face, which seems to assert a certain confidence with this work he has produced. I entered this exhibition, featuring only this work Judy, expecting to be put on and to have a laugh. Instead, Tasset has managed to subvert my expectations yet again. This work, which as far as I can gather, is deeply personal; and unabashedly so. It is unapologetically vulnerable, sweet, tender, and sad. As much as I’ve been thoroughly amused with and responded to Tasset’s other work, this one gets me in a way that is completely unexpected. The film operates like some powerful and devastating love poem within the small space of a few succinctly placed lyrical lines.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 1973.

http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/tasset-leo-koenig-inc-projekte/2316
whitehotmagazine.com

Buying Art You Can’t Take Home

2011-07-08T12:37:00.001-04:00

“I think good art is when I can hear the ideas bouncing off each other in my brain

...“What’s interesting is people talking about the work,” says Josée. “You may think more about a Weiner [text piece], over time, than about some canvas you’ve bought…An idea may not be material, but it’s powerful.” She refers to her memory as the “medium” such works are realized in—and then you realize that that’s where most art lives, anyway, most of the time.

Newsweek

Currently processing:

2011-07-07T12:00:00.002-04:00

I have challenged myself to look at art (in person if possible everyday). Here are the pieces that are sticking

Several from the fantastic, Fragments in Time and Space at the Hirshhorn.

Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes

Sections of a Happy Moment, by David Claerbout

true

2011-07-02T10:11:00.000-04:00

the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

flannery o'connor.

Alexander Binder

2011-07-02T10:07:00.001-04:00

Alexander Binder

Neruda

2011-07-02T10:05:00.000-04:00

Kate Gilmore

2011-06-30T21:48:00.001-04:00

Tune Yards- Bizness

2011-06-30T21:40:00.001-04:00

The next month

2011-06-24T15:01:00.003-04:00

I am on a self created artist residency.

During this time I will:

1. Look at new art everyday (preferably in person at a gallery or museum)
2. Will write/read everyday
3. Will begin 2 new bodies of work
4. Will finish up loose ends with past work
5. Will walk the city/workout everyday
6. Will eat food, people, environments that nourish or challenge me
7. Will try and be as present/open as possible

The Blue Mosque

2011-06-24T14:51:00.003-04:00

As a child I lived/travelled to many countries...interested in how they/this influenced my development, etc.

Blue Mosque aka The Sultan Ahmed Mosque

Cell cycle

2011-06-23T11:31:00.008-04:00

NoblePrize.org

The cell cycle is the series of events that take place as the cells grow and divide. In average this process takes about 24 hours for cells in mammals. The game is rather easy to go through if you are familiar with the different phases in the cell cycle (cell growth, chromosome duplication, cell growth again, chromosome separation and finally cell division). If you're not, pay extra attention to the image of the cell cycle in the introduction. As a "Cell division supervisor", inside the cell nucleus, you are to steer the cell division process to make sure everything happens in the right order. If not, the cell will be destroyed and you'll have to start all over again. You also have to make controls now and then, to make sure nothing happened with the genetic material on the way. If you make too many mistakes, the energy level in the cell will drop and the cell division will not be able to proceed. The challenge is to complete the game and to make sure that the cell was correctly divided!

Game

Uta Barth

2011-06-21T21:35:00.004-04:00

“We all expect photographs to be a picture of something. We assume that the photographer observed a place, a person, an event in the world, and wants to record it, point at it…The problem with my work is that these images are really not of anything in that sense, they register only that which is incidental and peripheral to the implied it.” –Uta Barth

More

Nadav Kander

2011-06-21T21:29:00.002-04:00

Bill Henson

2011-06-21T20:58:00.006-04:00

Bill Henson google search

Marlene Dumas

2011-06-21T20:39:00.003-04:00

Dumas google search

Kirsten Kay Thoen

2011-06-19T09:37:00.003-04:00

kirstenkaythoen.com

“Many pictures turn out to be limp translations of the known world instead of vital objects which create an intrinsic world of their own.” – Robert Heinecken (1932-2006) Metamorph

The words of the self-proclaimed ‘para-photographer’ evoke the grounds for my formal explorations with photography. My creative process is largely informed by my concern with the impact of accelerating technologies on human perceptions of and relationships to nature.

My relationship to photography is a transformative one. The images in this portfolio document my experimental process of reworking nature-based imagery into nature-inspired, three-dimensional, forms. I am particularly attracted to creating an elevated experience of photography. Sacred geometry, alchemy, and architectural philosophies of visionaries such as Rudolph Steiner are key to the development of my work. Together my pieces assemble a personal vision of a contemporary nature culture.

Humble Arts

Don Williams - Good Ole Boys Like Me

2011-06-09T10:12:00.001-04:00

Sigalit Landau

2011-06-07T18:10:00.001-04:00

www.sigalitlandau.com

Sigalit Landau's committed and poetic approach turns personal questions, be they philosophical or political, into universal quests. To achieve this, she often combines performance, installations, objects and films. Her work crystallizes a collection of ideas through a single image, object or action, rendering them symbolic as in her "Barbed Hula" video, where she appears on a beach in Israel, naked, performing a hula hoop dance using a ring of barbed wire.

She has been, for several years, involved in an in-depth relationship with the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea (456m below sea level). She reacts, as an artist, to the terrible peculiarities of this site; this damaged place, which holds within it the region's geopolitical traumas, and is the scene of an ongoing ecological disaster. This is the place she has chosen to stage her unique oeuvre, inspired by her continual attraction to embody the ritual linked to memory. This is where she orchestrates her exploration of the archaeology of the present.

The overarching themes of Sigalit Landau's current exhibition will be water, soil, and salt. Through these basic elements the artist will explore issues of existence and survival: the interdependence of people and nations in her native region, and their common interlinked future.

Landau, known for her complex site-specific installations (such as those presented at the Tel Aviv Museum and KW Berlin) is planning a new, poetic and multi-layered installation for the Israeli Pavilion in Venice. The new exhibition is yet another step in Landau's ongoing exploration of the tensions between public and personal issues and space.

Based on Landau's historical research, the launching point for the new installation is the small three-tiered Pavilion building in which her exhibit will dwell – a structure designed in the modernist style. For her show, the building's entrance will be relocated to the courtyard – a space originally meant to be kept away from public view.

The title the artist has already given to her work for the pavilion, "One man's floor is another man's feelings" is a variation on the familiar saying "one man's floor is another man's ceiling", which here becomes feelings. With this title, we might guess that the installation will evoke the interdependence of human beings and the sharing of riches. But the water that will be present all over the pavilion, like blood irrigating the body, is not only the precious liquid so scarce for billions of people, but it becomes a metaphor for the knowledge, sharing and feelings that connect us to each other and organize our common destiny. Like salt deposited on an object or penetrating a wound, the journey that Sigalit Landau is plotting for Venice, crystallizes the fears and hopes of these uncertain times.

Venice Biennale 2011: Mike Nelson

2011-06-07T17:01:00.000-04:00

divining meteorology

2011-06-05T23:46:00.000-04:00

http://www.imamuseum.org/exhibition/william-lamson-divining-meteorology

expand

2011-06-05T00:23:00.001-04:00

Next Saturday

2011-05-19T13:16:00.008-04:00

My, Body Exhibition/Performance opens
Corcoran Gallery of Art (Free admission)
May 28th 10am-3pm
*Performance: 2pm

More info: http://www.chajana.com/
Pictures: Facebook group

Orly Genger

2011-05-16T07:27:00.000-04:00

"Women are constantly trying to define the body because they often find themselves being defined by it. Yet at the same time there is a feeling of being divorced from the body, as if physical identity belongs to the world as much as to oneself. So, female artists are often trying to deal with this 'thing' that seems to define us in some way and separate us. And this 'thing' really starts to become an object that we can hold up to the light and inspect from all angles, like sculpture."

Review

Laurent Grasso

2011-04-18T18:46:00.001-04:00

Black Box: Laurent Grasso

Tony Orrico: Penwald: 2: 8 circles (2009)

2011-04-13T16:14:00.000-04:00

Matthew Robinson

2011-04-04T20:46:00.002-04:00

matthewwrobinson.com

lovelovelove

2011-03-25T16:36:00.000-04:00

think-make-think

2011-03-24T16:23:00.006-04:00

--John Maeda

Nummer Negen (#9) The Day I Didn't Turn with the World

2011-03-22T06:53:00.004-04:00

Another piece I'm thinking about... which I saw at the
Hirshhorn with Hiroshi Sugimoto a few months back. Note. Often I read reviews where his work is described as depressing. I do not see it that way.

Guido van der Werve

"For this piece, the artist stood at the geographic North Pole for a single day, turning clockwise while the earth below him moved in the opposite direction.

Filmed every 6 seconds and condensed into 9 minutes of time-lapse footage, this poignant evocation of the Romantic hero - the tortured individual; the Wertherian or Byronic outsider - depicts the artist quite literally out of synch with the rest of the world."

Michael Waugh- Part #3

2011-03-14T20:40:00.004-04:00

Love, love, loved this exhibition. From performance to the drawings (made from words) to sculpture weaving around the floor...

Decline and Fall
March 3, 2011–April 9, 2011
michaelwaugh.com Schroeder Romero & Shredder

Decline and Fall features large-scale drawings, video documentation of performance works and a new installation that exposes the act of reading as an act of accumulation—as old-fashioned and melancholy in a world dominated by sound-bytes and disposability. As with Waugh’s previous multi-disciplinary shows, these disparate forms dovetail with each other through their use of language, text and prodigious amounts of labor. In each of the works on view, the hand of the artist and the personal time it records stands in absurd contrast to the vast ideas explored in the texts, namely the various iterations of cultural collapse.  

John Gerrard

2011-03-13T20:12:00.005-04:00

I did not see his work in NYC this weekend but I have been thinking about his work/artist talk that was at the Hirshhorn last year.www.johngerrard.net

"Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas) 2007 is based on a single archival photograph of a storm from the 1930s American Dust Bowl, a man-made environmental catastrophe caused by a surge in petroleum based power, and a major contributor to what became the Great Depression. No moving images of the event are known to exist. The production of this work involved the virtual reconstruction - based on hundreds of the artists own photographs and films - of a ten-mile square section of Texan landscape close to the town of Dalhart, a landscape dotted with windmills, farms and fences. This documentation was subsequently enhanced by publicly accessible satellite and topographical data. Once activated, a virtual storm unfolds in a sculptural and constantly random manner within the reconstructed landscape."

Part 2- Jacques Louis Vidal

2011-03-13T14:14:00.006-04:00

"... Beyond this corridor Vidal has designed a room that will live out what may have become a lost ideal of the Internet, as a place where interaction is enhanced, and not stilted. In this room you may speak at length with anonymous others, you can plug in your own headphones and listen to five different conversations from a different time and place, you can read the memories of these conversations mapped and transcribed onto geometric plants, or you can just sit and listen for movement." www.marcjancou.com

Favorite exhibitions- NYC- Part 1- HIRAKI SAWA

2011-03-13T13:39:00.008-04:00

O abstracts the notion of time by the simultaneous depiction of interior and exterior spaces, meditations on the moon and the earth, and suggestions of the present and distant past.

"The installation transports the viewer into a dreamlike state in which he or she is enveloped in an immersive world of sound and image. Ten small monitors show black and white video of ordinary objects - such as a bell or a cup - spinning endlessly. Three large projections show a selection of black and white images from Australia’s desert landscape surrounding the town of Alice Springs; an unspecified ocean view that melts into footage of a flock of birds flying across the desert sky, and color shots that linger of the interior of an abandoned house in the south of France brought to life with Sawa’s recurring and signature animations: a ferris wheel, flying birds, a tree with fluttering leaves and a rising moon. The audio component, created by the group Organ Octet and edited by Dale Berning, is presented on custom-built speakers that spin intermittently, sending the clatter and rolling sounds of spinning objects and the airy tones of miniature organs around the space." James Cohan

Art in America review of the show

New Humanism

2011-03-08T19:10:00.000-05:00

...Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.
New Humanism

asking questions

2011-03-06T16:54:00.001-05:00

NAUMAN:"...And then what makes the work interesting is if you choose the right questions. Then, as you proceed, the answers are what's interesting. If you choose the wrong questions and you proceed, you still get a result, but it's not interesting. And so that's in there. I think I learned some of that from Sol LeWitt who does a lot of that. He builds a structure that you have to work with, and the work could come out different every time. But if you follow the structure, it's interesting, sometimes beautiful and sometimes just interesting."

ART:21: How you determine the right questions in order to proceed?

NAUMAN: Well, that's the art part and that's what you don't know. That's the hard part. And sometimes the question that you pose or the project that you start yourself turns into something else, you know, but at least it gets you started. And sometimes you finish and you look at it and say "I got a bad result, I don't like what came out here." And so you have to start over, or change it somehow. We were having dinner with the Tuttles one time, Richard and Mamie. And I had said that about Sol [LeWitt], that he was interested in finding these questions and setting them up and seeing what happened. And Richard said, "Well, that's the difference between us, because I already know the answers." (LAUGHS) And so I was driving home with Susan [Rothenberg] and I thought,"You know, I forgot to ask him what they were." (LAUGHS) I was just so amazed.

nauman

OSKAR DAWICKI

2011-03-06T12:02:00.005-05:00

... All of his works have a post-conceptual character and emanate a slightly grotesque, ironic and even absurd aura. Dawicki joins in his works a romantically-tragic component (highly saturated with his own existential dilemmas) with poetics and the critical dimension of conceptual art. The self-reflection over his own institutional status as a contemporary artist is tightly interwoven with reflection on his own identity, or rather on its transitoriness, conventionality, airiness and weakness. Discomfort, disagreement, complication - these are the terms on which this artist's imagination is founded, while the non-productivity of art seems to Dawicki to be its most promising aspect."

Current show at postmaster
OSKAR DAWICKI

Steve Lambert

2011-03-05T08:27:00.003-05:00

visitsteve.com

LES Printshop Catalog Essay
August 2010
From the Lower East Side Printshop’s Special Edition Residency 2010 Catalog Essay by Sarah Hanley.

Steve Lambert
... Though he possesses traditional degrees in art from respected institutions, he has managed to escape the solipsistic trap that often results from such training to create work that anyone, anywhere, can connect with and understand. Finally, though the final product is frequently something that cannot be owned or possessed as an investment in a traditional sense, this is not his sole intention or driving concept. Instead, Steve Lambert has dedicated his career to creating pubic signs, freeware, websites, and publications that will truly cause anyone who is lucky to witness them to stop and think, or to just improve their lives in a simple but meaningful way.

Take for example his freeware Firefox application titled ADD-ART, which replaces all ads on the browser with artwork. Or his special mock edition of the New York Times (http://nytimes-se.com), which unlike its sarcastic relation The Onion, envisions a truly guileless and utopian alternate reality in which all public universities are free and Condoleezza Rice holds a press conference to frankly confess that the Bush Administration knew all along that there were no WMDs.

Lambert brought this spirit of enjoyable subversion to his residency at the Printshop with a series of three prints that challenge basic ideas behind ownership of art. He was guided by one of two (or a combination of both) of the following self-determined principles. First, he wanted people who buy the work to have to come to terms with the fact that “you can’t get a perfect one.” This concept sprang from Lambert’s interest in Buddhist ideas, specifically, that one must accept things as they are, because that is how they should be. OUT OF IDEAS is a screenprint in Lambert’s signature brushwork lettering style (downloadable on Lambert’s website) and each impression is either torn in two, splashed with coffee, or both, depending on the artist’s whim. Likewise, each impression of the variable edition screenprint This is Perfect is uniquely off register. No two are alike, but also – none are perfect. Lambert’s choice of palette for this print was inspired by the color scheme for a palace he visited during a trip to Turkey with a friend, who noticed that one of its tiles had a mistake in the pattern. They later learned that this was intentional and all Islamic art incorporates a flaw, as Muslims believe that nothing can be perfect but Allah.

Lambert was also interested in overturning the expectation that a collector can buy his work and simply look at it. This was the guiding principle for In BLANK days… , an interactive print that requires the owner to fill in the chalkboard-painted blanks. Depending on the choice of words, the resulting statement can become a directive/goal, a means of stress release, or a source of humor. “If you own the work, you have to do something. It’s not just…I own it, and that’s the end.

Jason de Caires Taylor

2011-03-01T14:35:00.002-05:00

"Artist Jason de Caires Taylor creates life-size cement sculptures of people and submerges them into the waters of South America"

drowning-beautiful

Performance 9: Allora & Calzadilla

2011-02-21T21:47:00.000-05:00

Rita Carter - Multiplicity

2011-02-21T20:08:00.003-05:00

Multiplicity

The expression of multiple versions of the self is discussed in Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality, Identity and the Self by Rita Carter, who writes that our interactions with different social groups (friends, family, lovers, business colleagues) heavily influence the way we choose to present ourselves. We naturally adapt to our surroundings, sliding from one identity to another as the situation demands. Similarly, the artists in Persona adopt chameleon-like personas, don self-made “second skins,” and project fragmented views of the body, to create a view of identity similar to the effect of light shining through a prism, each part separating out into different, though often enigmatic, representations of the self.persona-a-body-in-parts

Sadie Plant's Zero's & Ones:

2011-02-21T13:09:00.000-05:00

Those were the days, when we were all at sea. It seems like yesterday to me. Species, sex, race, class: in those days none of this meant anything at all. No parents, no children, just ourselves, strings as inseperable sisters, warm and wet, indistinguishable one from the other, gloriously indiscriminate, promiscuous and fused. No generations. No future, no past. An endless geographic plane of micromeshing pulsing quanta, limitless webs of interacting blendings, leakings, mergings, weaving through ourselves, running rings around each other, heedless, needless, aimless, careless, thoughtless, amok. Folds and foldings, plying and multiplying, plicating and replicating. We had no defintion, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart. We were whatever we were up to at the time. Free exchanges, microprocesses finely tuned, polymorphous transfers without regard for borders or boundaries. There was nothing to hang on to, nothing to be grasped, nothing to protect or be protected from. Insides and outsides did not count. We gave no thought to anything at all. Everything was there for the taking then. We paid no attention: it was all for free. It had been this way for tens, thousands, millions, billions of what were later defined as years. If we had thought about it, we would have said it would go on forever, this fluent, fluid world.

Crystals

2011-02-20T08:29:00.000-05:00

Cave of Crystals

Mexico's Cave of Crystals stunned geologists when it was first discovered in 2000. The underground chamber contains some of the largest natural crystals ever found - some of the selenite structures have grown to more than 10m long. Professor Iain Stewart got a rare glimpse of the subterranean spectacle while filming for the new BBC series How the Earth Made Us.