October 31, 2009

MoMA Showcases Eight New Films in Exhibition of Foreign Language Cinema

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MoMA Showcases Eight New Films in Exhibition of Foreign Language Cinema



From 'Postales de Leningrado' (Postcards from Leningrad), Venezuela, 2007.
Written and directed by Mariana Rondón.

NEW YORK, NY.- MoMA presents 'Iberoamérica: Our Way(s)', an exhibition of eight new
Spanish- and Portuguese-language films representing collaborations among filmmakers from
10 different countries. The exhibition celebrates the quality and originality of these films, which
have all received support from the intergovernmental organization Ibermedia, now in its twelfth year.
'Iberoamérica: Our Way(s)' is presented from November 5 through 13, 2009, in The Roy and
Niuta Titus Theaters, and includes films that were made between 2007—the year of MoMA’s
first Ibermedia series—and 2009. Ibermedia supports film production ... More
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Fernado Botero

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "Christie's Latin American Sale Offers Works by Botero, Matta and Tamayo



Fernando Botero, 'Mother and Child', 1990, Estimate: $450,000-650,000. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd. 2009.

NEW YORK, NY.- On November 17 and 18, Christie's will offer an exceptional selection of works by leading artists representing 15 countries in its Latin American Sale. Rich in offerings from private collections, the two-day auction offers works by leading Latin American artists such as Fernando Botero, Claudio Bravo, Joaquín Torres-García, Wifredo Lam, Matta, and Rufino Tamayo, among others. Featuring over 250 works, the sale is expected to realize in excess of $15 million. Fernando Botero is well represented in the sale with major examples of the breadth and scope of his best artistic output. Exceptional works on paper, ... More"
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Rags Media Collective

Foreign Policy In Focus | Activist Listeners: "

Activist Listeners

Niels Van Tomme October 29, 2009
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus

raqs plane
Raqs Media Collective, There Has Been a Change of Plan, 2006
Operating from Delhi since the early 1990s, Raqs Media Collective has developed a multifaceted body of work with a unique take on globalized culture. Mixing contemporary art with historical and philosophical theory, their diverse work consists of a wide range of old and new media techniques, including image-text collages, installations, performances, and media objects.

Reflecting on the politics of mobility and dislocation, There Has Been a Change of Plan (2007) is a series of photographs of derelict airplanes. Showing removed noses, damaged wings, or other states of ruin, the work is an invitation to pause and converse about the 'debris of the unrealizable.'

Raqs' projects are open-ended, often incorporating open-sourced networks. OPUS [Open Platform for Unlimited Signification] (2001 onwards), for instance, is an online database of artist-submitted artworks. Conceived in the spirit of open-source software development, it's an online space that enables visitors to view, create, and exhibit media objects, as well as appropriate and modify work originally produced by others. The collective's devotion to free and open culture can also be seen in The Sarai Program at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. Sarai, a network of artists and scholars, produces interdisciplinary research and practice on urban space, media, and information, all of which is subsequently placed in the public domain.

Raqs Media Collective reaches well beyond the confines of the art world to appeal to communities both on and off line. 'Raqs' translates into 'dance' in Farsi, Arabic, and Urdu. But founding members Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta once jokingly stated, however, that raqs stands for 'rarely asked questions.'

NIELS VAN TOMME: Let's start with the beginning: How was Raqs Media Collective formed? To which conditions did it respond?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: 2009 marks the 18th year of our work together. In 1991, we were new graduates from a film & media school in Delhi (the Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia University) who had enjoyed the experience of collaborating. We then officially came together, wanting to continue exploring the documentary form as a collective.

The years 1991 to 2000 were spent chasing several essay-film proposals (that never got made), writing reviews for newspapers, working as assistants with other filmmakers, working as researchers, technicians, and producers on the fringes of the television industry in Delhi and making the occasional short film.
During this time, we traveled extensively across India. We pursued an oral history project on cinematography and camerawork that enabled us to have many long conversations with veteran cinematographers, some of whom were at that time struggling with neglect and amnesia. We were also active in the discussions within the expanding documentary film and video scene in India and spent long hours chasing ghosts in different archives. We had conversations with bystanders on the fringes of weekly anti-nuclear protests, read voraciously, and sometimes to each other, saw films and plays and wrote reviews of them for newspapers, and stayed awake through late night screenings of Bollywood films in grubby cinema halls. We generally kept ourselves going, high on enthusiasm and low on income and prospects, but with a cheer born of friendship, solidarity, and the evolution of a shared vision of practice.

In the late 1990s, the coalition of power in New Delhi — led by a right-wing party with avowed revivalist aims — had set off India's second set of nuclear tests, ushering in a climate of intense anxiety. A new aggressive, triumphalist belligerence, buoyed by a discourse made up in equal parts of euphoria and paranoia, seemed to thicken the air. Everything from textbooks to the scripts of films and news bulletins on television were being written to the tune of a manic nationalism.

There was an urgency for a space for critical reflection, for practice forged on new terms. And it was during this period that our conversation with Ravi Sundaram and Ravi Vasudevan (both scholars at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an independent research center and think tank with strong dissident credentials and a reputation for critical theoretical reflection) consolidated itself in the creation of Sarai in 2000. We wanted to build a space equally hospitable to intellectual rigor and creative dynamism. The challenge was to build new streams of public knowledge focused on the city as a space of communication and exchange, as a site for an intense level of media activity of all kinds. At the same time, we wanted to create a space that, through its practices, would question the protocols of entry and access to networks of knowledge, such that the production and nurturing of knowledge itself could become a democratic imperative.

NIELS VAN TOMME: You describe the Sarai Program as a "research center, publishing house, cafe, conference house, cinema, software laboratory and studio for digital art and design." What have you achieved with it since its inception and what are you still aiming for?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: Sarai was a specific response to what we felt were the institutional crises of cultural and intellectual life at the turn of the 21st century. These were: a flawed, insecure contemporaneity that saw itself in terms of lack and anxiety, a poverty of sustained interdisciplinary dialogue, hermetic separations between the domains of practice and theory, a suspended engagement with the city and with urban conditions, and a failure to address or recognize communication, information, and media as objects of creative engagement or philosophical reflection. Apart from all this, there was nothing at that time that could offer hospitality to new and emerging practices, that archived contemporary culture, that even offered young people a safe space to be together and think freely outside institutional constraints.

The nine years of Sarai have seen an enormous change in all these areas. The Sarai fellowships have produced a tide of contemporary practice and practitioners. Forms that had no chance of developing a sustained body of practice in India, such as the graphic novel, sound art, software art, and performance, now have stable bodies of work around them, partly thanks to Sarai fellowships. We kick-started the revolution in the opening up of Indian languages to cyberspace through early interventions in free and open source software for Indian languages. Now there is a burgeoning new public sphere on the internet in Hindi and other languages that is directly attributable to Sarai's efforts in the field. The robust challenges to censorship and self-censorship and the tyranny of intellectual property that have emerged in the last few years in India can be traced back to an extent to the work that began at the Sarai Program. Our preliminary investigations into surveillance, into the vibrant cultures of piracy and into the interface between politics, political economy, and information are beginning to yield a lively public debate on these issues. And a large number of questions that are now commonplace factors of public discourse — from the state of the urban environment to issues of eviction and displacement as a result of urban "redevelopment" to the rights of queer people in India — were in many ways first "aired" within the hospitable safety of the Sarai cafe, and on electronic discussion lists hosted by the Sarai website.

An enormous range and number of people have passed through the program over the last nine years. People have come to Sarai for events and conferences, for screenings and workshops, as designers and artists, as writers and readers, as interns and residents, or just to have coffee and conversations and feel unburdened of the heavy load of intellectual hierarchies and orthodoxies. Next year we plan to release ten new books, which range from comic books to a new issue of the Sarai Reader. We plan to launch some ideas that we hope can act as probes into new areas of practice and reflection. We’re currently working within the framework of Sarai to embed enduring yet provisional and lightweight studio situations for constellations of artists and practitioners into the fabric of the city of Delhi. We hope that this will allow us to work in a capillary vein within the city, infusing interstitial urban spaces with new cultural and artistic energies.

NIELS VAN TOMME: Notwithstanding your very active work as cultural workers and activists with Sarai, as artists you refuse to take an activist position. Why do you find it important to define a significant part of your work as 'art practice'? Why is such distinction necessary?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: Activism, in the sense that it often gets framed, presumes a separation (and a hierarchy) between living, reflecting, creation, and action. We do not accept these distinctions. For us, an ethical and political strain runs through every aspect of life-practice, including those that are silent, or only apparently inactive.

raqs escapement
Raqs Media Collective, Escapement, 2009
The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus once said, 'Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.' We think silence is not given its due in the world. Silence is important, because you can't listen effectively if there is no space created through silence around any given instance of speech. Though we use text and words quite often, we have often preferred to work through an ethic of listening rather than speaking aloud. If we could be described as activists, then the only way would be to see (or hear) us as 'activist listeners.' We listen to everything.

We understand the importance of bearing witness to the world but insist that there is no right and true way in which to bear witness. The language of witnessing is capable of infinite subtlety and delicacy, and allows for sustained exploration or ambiguities as much as it enables swift and sure slogans. The contemporary world is enthralled by the fear and delight produced by commodities; it is insecure about questions of identity, belonging and sovereignty. These issues demand not just 'activism' but also sustained reflection. And the prerogative of activism (while not unimportant in itself) can never be allowed to replace, or overwhelm, the sustained need for reflection, and the creation of new contexts, ambiences, and situations for enacting new and different responses to our complex world.

NIELS VAN TOMME: Sightings is a series of photographs of decaying architecture. Taken together, these images seem to indicate the possibility of an entire map of the world that can be deciphered from the close observation of walls that need renovation. Could you elaborate on this remarkable project?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: We have this habit of walking around in Delhi or any other city we get to spend time in. These are walks without much orientation or intent. These walks open us to various ways in which a surface emerges, peels off, and vanishes. Walks have a quality of arresting you to slower rhythms. Sightings emerged from a surface that we encountered in our neighborhood. The wall opened itself to an amazing range of imagining. Forgotten places, mythical places, real places, cartographic habits — they all made their way into our conversation with that wall. So many lives were peopled in it.

NIELS VAN TOMME: You received international recognition with installations that suggest complex relationships between different media such as video, still images, text, sound, software, performance, sculpture, and found objects. In which way do these installations differ from your earlier film work?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: Clearly, they differ formally. And the formal difference follows from our view of the way the different mediums can be put to work. Film is mainly a single-channel medium, with a linear presence in time. The reason why we have on occasion abandoned single-channel formats is because we have often found it necessary to project on to more than one surface, use different temporal registers to express different ideas in a single work, and mix sound, image, objects, text, and textures of more than one kind.

The education of filmmakers in film schools involves an immersion in a wide range of disciplines. As a film student, you are expected to engage with theatre, photography, literature, sound and music, graphic design, and visual culture in general. These are thought of as essential inputs, the absorption of which shapes a cinematic sensibility. All of these influences are supposed to flow into the making of your scripts and storyboards.

Somehow, in our case, these 'influences' did not subordinate themselves to the making of our 'filmmaker' selves. They continued to hold a place in our practice independent of any one master-narrative. The many-headed hydra of our practice emerges from this entanglement with different forms. This is what makes our practice a growing, constantly transforming constellation of different modes of doing and making things.

NIELS VAN TOMME: You often explore the nature of knowledge, learning, and creativity. In which way can we engage differently with such notions through art and culture compared to more straightforward channels of pedagogy?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: We remember well what it is to forge one's ideas, not with books in sumptuous libraries, but with faded, smudged, stained photocopies of texts passed eagerly from hand to hand in the days before the internet. This experience of 'knowing' can never be separated from the solidarity and sharing that underwrote the knowledge. It also implied that the sources of knowledge never had for us a somber, authoritative totality. When your library is a patchwork of torn pages, your learning has to be a matter of live improvisation more than it can ever be a performance of leaden completeness.

As incorrigible autodidacts, we have a good sense of the pleasures and perils of swimming the rough currents of knowledge. In our understanding, nothing, not even what you call 'straightforward pedagogy,' can communicate a sense of these pleasures and perils better than art. Most importantly, as autodidacts, we have a good measure of the radical incompleteness of our intellectual horizons. This does not limit our practice; rather, it fuels our quests. The space of contemporary art today is hospitable to this experience of a joyous radical incompleteness of knowledge. That is why art practice allows us to develop and nurture our keen awareness of what we 'do not know' as an instrument with which to forge knowledge itself.

NIELS VAN TOMME: Although internationally very active, you are still based in Delhi and often make work that directly relates to that city. Nevertheless, you refrain from labeling yourself as "Indian." Can you explain why you prefer to identify yourself as being "from Delhi" instead? 

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: As a city of around 16 million people, Delhi is a world in itself. And it is possible to think the world from Delhi. Like many contemporary global cities it is too complex an entity to allow oneself to fully belong to it, and too dynamic to produce a sense of apathy or disinterestedness. You can neither let go of it, nor let it overwhelm you. We find this challenge to maintain a fine balance between commitment and distance, which repeats itself on an everyday basis, an intellectually and affectively demanding predicament. It keeps our thinking, and all our senses, on permanent alert.

Nation-states seem either too large or too small a frame to allow a real and concrete sense of engagement with the issues of our times, be they economic realities or ecological issues like global warming (for which they are too small), or the day-to-day arrangements of people’s lives (for which they tend to be much too large). They are the blunt instruments of realpolitik, but come laden with a sense of historically ordained arbitrariness and abstraction that makes it impossible to conceive of them as organically evolved entities. The 'origin myths' of national culture are usually conceived by dominant classes as ways to cover up the artifice of nation-building.

The specific histories and realities in different parts of the world do not necessarily map out in absolute accordance with the borders marked by the current system of nation-states. They are not independent of the nation-state system, but they are not identical with it. Local particularities can be larger or smaller than nation-states, depending on the question that they pertain to.

Given this reality, a more precise and acute application of national parameters (only when necessary) to questions of classification, taxonomy. and analysis of global realities is probably a better idea than the random and indiscriminate usage of the term 'national' for all things, and to all ends. The application of the 'national' framework in relation to the production of contemporary culture needs to be rigorously and thoroughly unpacked.

NIELS VAN TOMME: Are you currently working on any new projects?

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE: We have just finished designing currency for a hypothetical Bank of Time initiated by e-flux. We are editing the eighth Sarai Reader, which is going to be on 'Fear,' and are finishing a book, titled Seepage, that collects some of our writing and image and text-based essays.

We are working as dramaturges with a theatre director, who later this year is doing a new production based on Ibsen's play John Gabriel Borkman and our texts. We are working on a long-term investigation of spaces and histories in Warsaw, Berlin, and Bombay that is likely to culminate in a work early next year. We are in the middle of designing and conceiving some public art projects that we hope will be realized sometime next year. We are working on a screen-based work that grows out of Sleepwalkers Caravan that we made last year with sculptural insertions into the urban landscape of Delhi.

So, as you can see, as always, there are many different processes in motion, and we are just as eager as our publics to see how they will unfold.

Niels Van Tomme is associate director of arts and media at Provisions Library. He is also an independent curator, art critic, and contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. This series on new media is part of a special collaboration with Provisions Library supported by the Arca Foundation.


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All Hallows’ Sheaves

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All Hallows’ Sheaves

October 30th, 2009 by Sean Rogers in Four-Colour Words Comment »

Happy Halloween, once again, one and all! This year I ask that we consider some choice old horror anthologies, in whose pages lurk all sorts of scares and shocks. The horror tradition in comics has long been dominated by a model developed by the EC comics company in the 1950s, whose titles like Tales from the Crypt featured cornball “hosts” (the Cryptkeeper and his ilk), pun-filled narration, surprise twist endings (the werewolf was his brother!), wide-eyed bigfoot cartooning, and endless! exclamation! points! I admire EC and its murderer’s row of artists as much as the next comics reader, but our attentions now turn to those collections that worry the boundaries of the EC-style anthology, or pounce outside of them altogether.
* * *

In 1962, late in his career, kiddie comics master John Stanley briefly turned his hand to the horror genre. The indispensable Stanley Stories blog has lately been posting his strips from Ghost Stories and Tales from the Tomb in their entirety. The typically incisive commentary over there covers much of what I would want to say about these, frankly, kind-of-insane comics, so I urge you to click through.
I’d like to emphasize, though, just how much Stanley got away with, thanks to working under the aegis of Dell Comics, the innocuous, kids-only publisher of titles like Donald Duck, Little Lulu, and Fairy Tale Parade — atypical fare for the gore-and-guts set. Dell’s spotless G-rated record allowed it to publish beyond the censorial eye of the Comics Code Authority, who in the mid-’50s had neutered or foreclosed upon bloodthirsty troublemakers like EC and its imitators. Stanley’s first stabs at horror were allowed to revel in threats of dismemberment, ghastly suicide, child-killing monsters, parents devoured by malevolent forces, and a scissors-wielding grandma who wants to knit you.
These ghost stories are another order of spooky altogether, the kind that confounds expectation, logic, and often comprehension. Stanley’s uncredited collaborators stiffly delineate these dreamlike tales, and though the results are sometimes crude, they are always very far from inept. Underlying every panel and every page is Stanley’s visual sophistication, which grants even the most wooden or unpracticed renditions the stark and primal quality of nightmare.
When we break through the muddle of the story to those final, gigantic panels, the effect is authentically startling, if absurd. We come forcibly out of the tale as though we’re waking up in a cold sweat, breathless, puzzled as to what our fevered brains have conjured up. Like, the psychiatrist’s head is a quilt?
* * *

Six issues of Skull appeared between 1970 and 1972. Gary Arlington, proprietor of the renowned San Francisco Comic Book Company, came up with the bare bones idea for a horror anthology in the EC tradition; artist Greg Irons fleshed it out, and underground comics had another addition to its onslaught of horror books. Most of Skull featured the grim crosshatching grotesquerie of Irons and Jack Jackson, as well as the first UG work from the smooth and heavy metal-friendly pen of Richard Corben, among others. Some less out-and-out examples of the genre formed part of the scene, too, though I’m less familiar with them, having only caught the barest glimpses of Slow Death, or Insect Fear or, most tantalisingly, the gruesome cute brut of Rory Hayes’s Bogeyman (send in your unwanted copies c/o The Walrus).
Skull is worth singling out if only because it distinguished itself, late in the series, by taking EC’s literary aspirations and turning them inside out. So where EC’s go-to pulp auteur was the square and kind of respectable Ray Bradbury, the Skull crew gave over two entire issues to groovy, eldritch H.P. Lovecraft adaptations. True, the influence of Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos in literary horror has been as pervasive and maybe pernicious as EC’s in comics. At the time of the undergrounds, though, horror comics had as yet been been unmolested by the man’s tentacles, so an infusion of the Old Ones into the genre could at least boast the virtue of novelty. And at best, transposing Lovecraft to this setting helped connect with the UG’s flair for depicting goings-on in extremis (hence Michael Smith’s flesh-melting psychedelic freak-out in “Cool Air”). The gleeful, de trop stylings of many of the artists match well with Lovecraft’s squelching purple prose (”a nightmare caked and clotted with bloody shreds of alien flesh and hair, embraced by a malignant retinue of sleeping bats”).
In Skull’s final issue, the full-length “A Gothic Tale,” Irons and Corben — the twin poles of slick and dirty UG professionalism — took turns illustrating writer Tom Veitch’s centuries-spanning Lovecraftian story of mad science, gross monstrosity, and weird old religion. It’s a fine capstone to an interesting series, one of those fully conceived, self-contained little packages of which the underground was sometimes impressively capable.
* * *

In the 1980s, having helped redefine monster comics as part of the all-star Swamp Thing team (who, if you’re wondering, had nothing to do with the film), artist Steve Bissette had yet further services to perform in his favoured genre. Determined to continue setting an example for seriousness in horror comics, rather than uphold the cheesy old punch-pulling norm, Bissette cofounded and edited a series called Taboo. The books were thick tomes rather than floppy pamphlets, whose bold conception was on occasion actually matched by the capabilities of their contributors. Taboo’s publication history is fascinating and convoluted and depressing, tied as it is to the various industry implosions of the time. The result of this tortuous past is that the series is a record of projects interrupted, delayed, or left unfinished. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s Jack the Ripper saga From Hell concluded elsewhere, for instance, as did both the Moore-written porno epic Lost Girls and Jeff Nicholson’s Through the Habitrails, a sort of anti-Dilbert.
But the real one that got away was Throat Sprockets, an amalgam of not-quite-vampires and not-quite-snuff-films from Video Watchdog mastermind Tim Lucas. He completed the tale in prose novel form, but it’s forever to be regretted that his working relationship with initial artist Mike Hoffman fell through. Hoffman’s angular photorealism evinced a real feel for the sharpness and seediness of well-worn film prints, and Lucas proved remarkably adept at splicing and manipulating the language of comics.
Beyond this impressive array of halting serials, an above-average number of Taboo’s highlights arrived in isolated contributions. There were some very pretty stand-alone stories from neo-pre-Raphaelite Michael Zulli, including a jaw-dropper written by Neil Gaiman’s then-five-year-old daughter (Gaiman and Zulli’s take on Sweeney Todd is another Taboo-fostered project that screeched to a skidding stop). Chester Brown wrung an unsettling amount of pathos out of funny animals falling prey to the food chain. Al Columbia, standard-bearer of modern-day horror comics, contributed some vivid, frenzied outpourings. What continues to haunt me, though, are a handful of candidates for career-best work from underground legend S. Clay Wilson: his graphic and sweaty and desperate “This is Dynamite” in particular strikes me as truly taboo, so relentlessly did his penlines scratch away at deep human ugliness.
We could’ve used another couple dozen volumes of horror comics under Bissette’s stewardship, especially as the years have worn on and the talent pool has gotten deeper and darker, allowing for an easier skimming off of the dross. Imagine a thick regular instalment of something like Taboo, where Renee French’s soft-penciled parables of death and deformity, or Josh Simmons’s claustrophobic wrongness, or Columbia’s cartoon apocalypses, all rub scabby shoulders. Ah well, such dreams are for Halloweens yet to come.
* * *
Finally, in subject matter worlds away from this post: Saturday’s spate of IFOA XXX events includes my interview with Seth, whom I’ve gone on about before, and R.O. Blechman, whose far-reaching career making perfect little drawings should provide much to talk about. Details are here. Toronto readers, I’ll see you at noon in Harbourfront’s Brigantine Room.

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October 27, 2009

Symbiosis by Jelte van Abbema

Dezeen » Blog Archive » Symbiosis by Jelte van Abbema: "
Dezeen architecture and design magazine

October 27th, 2009
dzn_sq_ABOVE=BELOW_17
Dutch Design Week: Dutch designer Jelte van Abbema won the €10,000 Rado Prize at the Dutch Design Awards last week for a body of work including Symbiosis, an experimental project that involved printing with bacteria.
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Van Abbema printed on paper (top) and billboards (below), creating simple typographic forms that changed colour and form as the bacteria multiplied and then died.
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The Rado Prize, sponsored by watch brand Rado, is awarded each year for innovative, topical work by a young Dutch designer.
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See our earlier story on the overall winner of the Dutch Design Awards, Merry-go-round Coat Rack by Studio Wieke Somers, and best consumer product winner FlexVaas by Vij5.
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Here’s some info about Symbiosis from van Abbema, followed by his biography and info about the Rado Prize:

Symbiosis
Printed media puts a pressure on our environment. Solutions like soya ink or natural pigments are a way in the good directions, but Jelte van Abbema tried to take it a bit further. Floated curiosity to a new approach and a fascination for growth, he investigated the possibilities of bacteria in visual culture. To cause no epidemic he followed a course at the department microbiology of the university Wageningen.
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It’s revolutionary approach: printed-paper does not need to be finished when it rolls of the press. After a period of research he pressed with carefully composed bacteria text on posters. In a converted poster box of JCDecaux – in fact a huge Petri dish – he created the correct humidity and warmth to let the print grow.
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A new manner to publicly captivate without changing poster each week. Time gets barral at the work and transforms the image to something new. The bacteria act and create their own aesthetically induced dimension.

Winner Rado Young Designer Award 2009 – Jelte van Abbema
Jelte van Abbema was born in 1982 in Voorburg, the Netherlands. He grew up in the Dutch town of Wageningen, which is known for the life sciences and peacemaking. As a young gardener, he learned about the strangeness and beauty of nature, and with this he found the tools necessary to grow. Upon graduating high school in 2000, he began his studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven in Man & Communication. In June 2006, he graduated cum laude. His work was nominated for the René Smeets and Melkweg Design Awards and received the Willie Wortel Award for invention.
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In 2007, he founded Lab van Abbema to investigate how design, science and technology can combine to shape a new landscape that reflects the contemporary nature of our world. His ongoing search for making the unfamiliar familiar has resulted in numerous collaborations, and his work has been exhibited and published internationally.

RADO YOUNG DESIGNER AWARD
Winner: Jelte van Abbema “A promising marriage between art and science, based on in-depth research. This technical invention creates new images and forms.”
dzn_ABOVE=BELOW_17
RADO YOUNG DESIGNER AWARD
Graduates are hereby invited to sign up for the Rado Young Designer Award, the Dutch Design Awards’ incentive award for young, talented designers.
The international jury appoints the Rado Young Designer 2009 from three nominations selected from all entries by a special Rado selection committee. On Saturday 17 October, this winner will step into the spotlight on the most distinguished Dutch platform for design excellence.
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Finalists 2009
Designers from very different disciplines, but all three young and bursting with talent. Below a brief description of the three finalists for the Rado Young Designer Award, the DDA stimulus prize.
Atelier NL
Graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2006, now design studio Atelier NL. Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck already worked for, amongst others, Royal Tichelaar Makkum. Atelier NL shows that research is an essential part of the design process.
Jelte van Abbema
His work was previously nominated for, amongst others, the René Smeets and Melkweg Design Awards. In 2007, Lab van Abbema was established. He employs other disciplines in his work (science, computer technology, biochemistry) from which his designs are borne. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Mattijs van Bergen
Mattijs designs in the playing field between fashion and graphic design. He has an original and recognisable signature, which – despite the high fashion content – sounds a note with the public at large. He graduated from the ArtEZ Institute in Arnhem and obtained a Master’s in Women’s Wear from Central Saint Martins in London. Mattijs has worked for Viktor & Rolf’s studios, has already produced a number of ready-to-wear collections, and his name is gaining increasing international attention.
THE AWARD
First of all, of course, it is an honour to be the Rado Young Designer for one whole year. The winner receives 10,000 Euros in cash as well as support from Rado with regard to PR and communication, for example in the form of a press conference, articles in design magazines, and so on.
The winner will furthermore be honoured on the stage in the presence of around 1,100 guests during the celebratory Award Show of the Dutch Design Awards. The winner’s work will be included in the one-week DDA exhibition during the Dutch Design Week in the Brainport Greenhouse and highlighted in the DDA catalogue.
CRITERIA
The Rado selection committee judges entries on the following criteria:
  • individual style with a distinctive vision and expressive idiom taking shape
  • responding to topicality
  • active for 5 years at the most (no students)
  • versatility i.e. talented in various forms of expression
  • recognised as a talent by his/her peers
  • inventor and team player
  • living and working in the Netherlands


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Exhibition at Fotomuseum Winterthur Presents a Young Generation of Artists

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Exhibition at Fotomuseum Winterthur Presents a Young Generation of Artists




Aneta Greszykowska, 'Untitled Film Stills #13', 2006.

CLEVELAND, OH.- Seems familiar? We are constantly bombarded by images and information – at school, at work, in newspapers and on the web. All of these stimuli carry a multitude of underlying codes. Day in and day out, we navigate our way, more or less successfully, through a torrent of texts and images, subtle advertising messages and hard facts, official instructions and personal messages. New and long-established media alike vie for our undivided attention. What we tend to overlook is the fact that we are increasingly subject to a second, media-dominated reality in which we are no longer directly involved.

The exhibition featuring works by Becky Beasley (GB), Thomas Galler (CH), Aneta Grzeszykowska (PL), Thomas Julier (CH), Anja Manfredi (A), Ryan McGinley (USA), Taiyo Onorato / Nico Krebs (CH/CH), Clunie Reid (GB) and Oliver Sieber (D) explores this densely woven tapestry of direct and indirect experience, of immediate and mediated seeing. It quietly flags up the relationships and juxtapositions that permeate our casual, everyday navigation of parallel worlds. The young generation of artists presented here draw their inspiration from found images and their own creative originality, mapping out new territory in contemporary art photography. In this context, the term Karaoke symbolises a certain pleasure in citing and trying out familiar patterns and styles. The karaoke machine invented in 1971 by Daisuke Inoue presents melodies and lyrics hesitantly at first and then with increasing confidence. In this popular, non-hierarchical form of entertainment, the serious and the light-hearted are never far apart. Singing along develops into individual interpretation and imitation develops into innovation.

Aneta Grzeszykowska (*1974), Anja Manfredi (*1978), Becky Beasley (*1975) and Thomas Julier (*1983) are keenly aware of the affinities between their own work and that of artists who broke with certain artistic dogma to win their own freedom. Cindy Sherman’s 70-part series 'Untitled Film Stills' remains one of the foremost landmarks in post-modern art around 1980 and is widely regarded as the epitome of a feminist take on media reality. Over a period of several months in 2005, Aneta Grzeszykowska painstakingly adapted each and every subject in this milestone of recent art history, which itself has become enshrined as part of the canon, presented in countless exhibitions, essays and papers. When Anja Manfredi looks back on the historic highlights of modern dance in the 1930s and reconstructs outstanding works from the period by the likes of Isadora Duncan or Anna Pavlova for her camera, what she creates is to be regarded – in much the same way as the visual appropriations of Aneta Grzeszykowska – as a new approach and a new enquiry from today’s viewpoint.

Becky Beasleys sculptural black-and-white photographs such as 'Peel' (Floor) and 'Peel' (Wall) possess a vitality reminiscent of the early lead performances of Richard Serra, in which molten metal was hurled at gallery walls. Beasley presents her compelling large-format works in similarly energetic configurations – at times in the form of unprotected, matt prints, and at other times aseptically sealed behind cold, green acrylic glass. Whereas 'Curtains I – III' featuring three almost identical curtains, takes as its theme the sometimes tortuously slow creative process of the composer Glenn Gould, Trap deploys extremely subtle references and associations in its visual tracing of the 1972 performance 'Untitled (Tea Party)' by conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who, like Beasley today, staged his work solely for the camera.

Thomas Julier forges a similar link to the conceptualists of the late sixties when he (either solo or in collaboration with Cédric Eisenring) collates his vast creative output in small, copied spiral notebooks. As a visual form of equal importance, for wall display, he creates works showing bleak urban architecture and ambiguous organic shapes that recall the typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher, or the laconic cycles by Ed Ruscha and Sol LeWitt. Julier’s series explore existing works with a sense of detachment, levity and decisiveness that is thoroughly contemporary and at the same time leaves the historic sources of inspiration firmly in the past.

Thomas Galler (*1970) uses clear-cut search criteria to trawl the deluge of media images for visual and textual quotes, which he then arranges in new semantic configurations. He is fascinated by such concepts as death, violence and protest in diverse cultures and by the way that these are portrayed in almost identical images. In his compelling new 5-part video 'Week End' (IDF Series) the artist celebrates a new popular visual form on the internet. Thomas Galler has collated hundreds of snapshots of young Israeli female soldiers who have posed for the camera in their free time and posted the photos online. These pictures are well known from Viva and MTV video clips and are swapped thousands of times a day on mobile phones.

Unlike Thomas Galler, who tends to appropriate his visual sources without any further intervention or manipulation, Clunie Reid (*1971) adds her own slogans and polemical comments to the images she finds in a vast everyday archive of pictures and text fragments from all manner of media. The London artist creates a collage of marginal notes, headlines and illustrations from the tabloid press and scientific periodicals alike, producing an exciting visual array that she has combined in this exhibition to form the multi-part wall installation 'Take No Photographs', leave only ripples. In spite of the occasional undertone of cynicism, the resulting works never elevate themselves above life itself nor deny their roots.

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (*1979/*1979) take an approach that has obvious references to the history of photography, literature and music. On their road-trip through the United States, they found much that was already familiar – images which, in the course of the past century, have crystallised into the potent “Go West…” myth. 'The Great Unreal' is based on that myth, and yet it conveys a sense of today’s flawed America in search of a new identity.

Ryan McGinley (*1977) and Oliver Sieber (*1966) share an interest in the various forms of youth culture that seek to emulate the lifestyles of previous generations. Whereas figures in Ryan McGinley’s photographs seem to float freely in a powerful rush of color, Oliver Sieber deciphers the subtle codes and strata of meaning in the relatively small Japanese subculture of young people who like to dress in rockabilly, psychobilly, skinhead, mod or punk style. In its reference to what is actually a foreign culture, Oliver Sieber’s 'J_SUBS' tells of an idealistic world view that finds its points of reference in the past and lives them out in the present.

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October 20, 2009

Tears of Eros

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Major Exhibition Devoted to 'The Torments of Passion: The Dark Side of Sexual Desire'




A cameraman shoots video of James White's portrait of Rachel Weisz from 2004 at the inauguration of the exhibit 'Tears of Eros' at Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza museum. Photo: EFE/Emilio Naranjo.


MADRID.- The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid are presenting Tears of Eros, a major exhibition devoted to "The Torments of Passion: The Dark Side of Sexual Desire." The title of the exhibition is taken from the book by the French writer Georges Bataille, "Les larmes d’Eros," and is based on a number of his ideas on eroticism, such as the prohibition/transgression dialectic and the identification of the erotic with religious sacrifice.

The exhibition has a global, pansexual character, covering the widest range of orientations and types of desire: the male and female gaze and the heterosexual and homosexual one, voyeurism and exhibitionism, bondage and sadomasochism, and the different varieties of fetishism. All these differing aspects are to be found within the compendium of the myths of Eros, both those deriving from the Greco-Roman Olympus and those originating in the Bible. The present exhibition illustrates the survival of these myths up to the present day and their transformation in the modern era, a process that has given them new, perverse meanings.

The exhibition, which features 119 works including paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos, is organized thematically with each gallery devoted to one of the great myths of Eros. The central section runs from Romanticism to Symbolism and from there to Surrealism and contemporary art, while also including flashbacks to the Renaissance and Baroque. Within each section there is an emphasis on the dialogue between the art of earlier centuries and contemporary creation.

Through different periods and artistic media the visitor will see a number of symbolic motifs constantly reappearing, including tears, the wave and sea foam, hair, the serpent, cords for tying the flesh, etc, all of which define the image of the immortal but always changing figure of Eros.

MUSEO THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA

1. The Birth of Venus
According to Hesiod, Aphrodite (Venus in the Roman world) was born as an adult woman from the semen of Uranus that had fallen onto the sea. This newly-born Venus, still innocent but armed with all her powers of seduction, appears here in works by the two great French, 19thcentury academic painters, Amaury-Duval and Bouguereau, and in a sculpture by Rodin. As a counterpoint there are two contemporary works inspired by Botticelli’s Venus: a photograph by Rineke Dijkstra (the innocent version) and a painting by John Currin (in which this innocence is only skin-deep).

2. Eve and the Serpent
In traditional images of this episode, the "Fall" is a symmetrical scene with Adam and Eve on either side and the tree in the middle with the serpent twined around it. In the modern age, however, artists omitted Adam to focus on the complicity between the woman and the serpent, who interact and dance in an intimate manner. Particularly notable in this section are works by Franz von Stuck, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and the famous Snake Charmer by Henri Rousseau. They establish a dialogue with contemporary photographs of Nastassia Kinsi by Richard Avedon, and one of Rachel Weisz by James White, among others.

3. Sphinxes and Mermaids
The sphinx and the mermaid are two mythological monsters (terrestrial and aquatic) who embody the dangers of seduction. In this gallery 19th-century sphinxes by Gustave Moreau and Elihu Vedder coexist with present-day ones by Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois and Marc Quinn. In addition, "Nymphs and Mermaids" by Corot, Courbet, Burne-Jones and Franz von Stuck are shown alongside a photograph by Tom Hunter.

4. The Temptations of Saint Anthony
The traditional theme of the hermit assaulted by a series of disturbing visions of diabolic origin introduces the voyeur into the scene, whose contradictory attitude is at once participative and distant, active and inactive. This section includes works by Furini, Cézanne, Franz von Stuck, Picasso and Antonio Saura.

5. The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
A Captain in the Praetorian Guard and favorite of Diocletian, Sebastian was condemned by the Emperor to be shot at by his own archers. The image of the young soldier tied to a tree, naked, pierced with arrows and with an expression mid-way between agony and ecstasy, was used since the Renaissance as a pretext for sensual enjoyment and ultimately became a gay icon par excellence. This section has notable works by Bronzino, Guido Reni, Ribera and Gustave Moreau, as well as an outstanding sculpture by Bernini.

6. Andromeda Enchained
Andromeda is the female counterpart to Saint Sebastian in the present exhibition’s association of bondage and erotic enslavement. Chained to a rock and threatened by a sea monster, she is rescued by Perseus. This episode allowed artists such as Rubens and Millais to exploit the titillating contrast between naked flesh and the hero’s black armour. The Surrealists Dalí, Domínguez, Penrose and Bellmer implicitly evoked this myth in their sadistic manipulation of the female body.

7. The Kiss
The kiss is the image of amorous consummation, in which the lovers struggle to overcome their own individual identities in order to fuse into one being. This aim, however, can involve an open or latent violence and a cannibal passion for devouring the other or for acts of vampirism. These ideas are found here in works by Munch, Rodin, Franz von Stuck, Max Ernst, Magritte, Andy Warhol and Marlene Dumas. A separate room has three videos by Bill Viola related to the human couple and the fusion of their boundaries.

FUNDACIÓN CAJA MADRID
The first part of the exhibition, which takes place in the Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, reveals the mortal dangers of erotic passion. The second part, in the Sala de Alhajas of Caja Madrid, focuses on eroticized death. The act of dying resembles erotic ecstasy, while death appears under a dual guise: either softened and adorned as the sister of Sleep, or shown in its macabre aspect.

8. Apollo and Hyacinthus
The young Hyacinthus died in an accident while throwing the discus with his lover Apollo. The god’s mourning for Hyacinthus (a homoerotic version of Venus’s lament for Adonis) was depicted in a grandiose and theatrical but distant manner in Tiepolo’s great masterpiece in the Thyssen Collection. Subsequent depictions of the story by French Neoclassical painters such as Broc, Blondel and Dubufe reveal the development of a more intimate, close-up approach to homosexual love.

9. Endymion’s Dream
When the goddess of the Moon fell in love with the beautiful shepherd Endymion, she persuaded Zeus to bestow eternal youth upon him and make him fall asleep forever so that she could look at him every night. With Endymion the male body is presented as vulnerable and has surrendered to become a passive erotic object. The group of works on display includes traditional interpretations such as those by Rubens, Guercino, Girodet and Canova, continuing into the modern era with the recent video by Sam Taylor-Wood that depicts David Beckham asleep.

10. Cleopatra or Voluptuous Agony
In 19th-century depictions of Cleopatra’s suicide, poisoned by the snake, the poses of the bodies suggest both the act of dying and also orgasm. Another beautiful suicide victim, Ophelia, is depicted in works by Gregory Crewdson and Tom Hunter. From Man Ray to Dalí and Delvaux, the Surrealists’ nudes celebrated the parallel between death and orgasm (le petit mort) and between oblivion and ecstasy.

11. The Penitent Magdalen
Mary Magdalen, the repentant sinner par excellence, retired to the desert. Nude or covered only by her flowing hair, she weeps and meditates before a book, cross and skull. The mortification of the flesh and sensual indulgence are ideas expressed in works by Luca Giordano, Canova, Lefebvre, Puvis de Chavannes, Kiki Smith and Marina Abramovic.

12. Head Hunters
In the biblical stories of Judith and Holofernes, Salome and Saint John the Baptist, and David and Goliath, the decapitated head exhibited as a trophy acquires a profoundly erotic intensity. Decapitation as a metaphor for castration by a “femme fatale” (or by an ephebe of similar type) is illustrated through works by Francesco del Cairo, Valentin de Boulogne, Jacob van Oost, Guercino, Tiepolo, Benjamin Constant, Lévy-Dhurmer, Franz von Stuck and Cindy Sherman.






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Beauty

'Research & Creative Activity' magazine takes a look at beauty

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- What is beauty? Is it really only in the eye of the beholder? How do we decide what is beautiful, and what is not?

The fall 2009 issue of Indiana University's award-winning Research & Creative Activity magazine reflects on the art and artifice of beauty, from makeover shows to music to what makes Cindy Crawford attractive.

In an opening story, cultural studies expert Brenda Weber, an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington, looks at America's obsession with appearance, as manifested in makeover shows on television. Having viewed more than 2,500 hours of makeover TV, Weber says these 21st century shows are really versions of the oldest stories we know.

"The resurrection is a makeover story," Weber says. "Ovid tells stories about transformation and change. Pygmalion is a makeover story. We have been telling makeover stories since 5,000 B.C." Cultural and media studies expert Radhika Parameswaran, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at IU Bloomington, studies the makeover phenomenon of skin-whitening, especially the aggressive promotion of skin-whitening products in India. A globalized "beauty culture" is affecting India, according to Parameswaran. Traditional norms of beauty are being redefined in terms of Western associations with success, empowerment and the attractiveness of light-colored skin. Whitening is also a theme in "Beauty and the Bleach," a story on the work of researcher Bruce Matis at the IU School of Dentistry at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, a national expert on the techniques and effects of whitening our teeth.

In other stories, IU scientist Heather Rupp of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Bloomington discusses her research on how hormones affect the human brain when it comes to sexual attraction and decision-making. IU Bloomington professor of psychology and cognitive scientist Thomas Busey talks about why we consider some human faces more attractive than others. (Hint: Cindy Crawford is remarkably well-spaced).

A variety of art, from unique furniture designs to digital prints, adorns the issue. Featured artists include Peg Brand, associate professor of philosophy at IUPUI; Tina Newberry, professor of fine arts at IU Bloomington; Rowland Ricketts, assistant professor of textiles at IU Bloomington; Cory Robinson, assistant professor of furniture design at the Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI; and Marilyn Whitesell, an associate professor of fine arts and graphic design at IU Southeast.
Brand's paintings are included in a story that features her thoughts on forging a new feminist aesthetics. Chancellor's Professor of African art history Patrick McNaughton, at IU Bloomington, also weighs in on aesthetics as a social and strategic tool.

William Jones, clinical professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IU Bloomington, questions our contrary relationship with natural beauty, as evidenced in human treatment of lake shorelines, while Jacobs School of Music Professor Thomas Robertello draws out deep connections between visual art and musical performance. Finally Judith Brown, assistant professor of English at IU Bloomington, dissects the symbolic meanings of glamour, while Kate Rowold, professor of fashion design and culture at IU Bloomington, reveals the elements of glamorous style.
Research & Creative Activity magazine is published semiannually by IU's Office of the Vice Provost for Research. The current issue may be downloaded at research.iu.edu/magazine.



Research at IU | Research & Creative Activity Magazine: "
RESEARCH & CREATIVE ACTIVITY Fall 2009 'Beauty'
What is beauty? Is it really only in the eye of the beholder? How do we decide what is beautiful, and what is not?

The Fall 2009 issue of Indiana University's award-winning Research & Creative Activity magazine reflects on the art and artifice of beauty, from makeover shows to music to what makes Cindy Crawford attractive. Dowload PDFs of the issue below.

Cover Fall 2009Front cover
Editor's Notes and Table of Contents
Abstracts
Art That Makes You Think
Makeover Nation
Skin Deep
Re-visioning Beauty
The Textures of Nature
Rowland Ricketts (textiles)
Marilyn Whitesell (digital prints)
The Art of Lakescaping
An Orchestration of Art
Under the Influence
The Nature of Glamour
Beauty and the Bleach
More Than a Pretty Face
Elements of Style
Second Look
Terrain Cabinet and Self-Portrait as Five Small Drawers (outside back cover)
Entire issue (6.9MB)
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October 18, 2009

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the obliteration of Self

Culture High, Culture Low: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the obliteration of Self: "



Both aspects of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge amalgamated as a Vitruvian 'Pandrogyne'

I feel bad that I didn't get to see (or write a blog entry about) Invisible Export's show of artwork by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, entitled '30 Years of Being Cut Up,' until the exhibition was literally in its final weekend. The body of work displayed on the walls was interesting not only on its own (the collages range in intent from Fluxus-inspired antagonism to magic spellcasting) but also as a facet of one of the most interesting, if at times perplexing, examples of defining and owning one's own identity.


Beauty is in the Eye, 2006.


Red Well, 1999.


Unless noted, artwork images are from the Invisible Exports show linked at the top of this article.
More are here (very much Not Safe For Work).

In talking about P-Orridge, correct use of gender-specific pronouns will get very complicated. Please bear with me -- I've tried to use the artist(s)' terminology and delineations wherever possible.


(placeholder for live TG image)

For those readers who aren't familiar with Genesis P-Orridge in the many phases of his (and now he/r) career, here's a really brief synopsis: Born as Neil Megson in 1950; formed the performance-art collective COUM Transmissions around 1969; turned COUM into the pioneering electronic-noise/industrial music act Throbbing Gristle in 1975, recording and touring with TG until the bands' dissolution in 1981; that same year, formed another music group, Psychic TV, releasing music under that band name through to the present day; introduced the subcultural 'modern primitive' trends of body modification and neo-paganism to the 'alternative' audience through the 80s and 90s; as Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and other musical acts, has released over 200 albums, including a Guinness-record-setting 70 in one calendar year (as Psychic TV).

But here's where it gets really interesting:


Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (left) and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (right). Image from New York Magazine's great recent interview

In 2003, P-Orridge moved to Brooklyn with his second wife, Lady Jaye, née Jacqueline Breyer, and began an ongoing experiment in body modification aimed at creating one pandrogynous being named 'Genesis Breyer P-Orridge". The two began this project by getting matching breast implants, then approximately $200,000 worth of plastic surgery to resemble each other. They dressed identically, copied each other's mannerisms, and both replaced the pronoun "I" with "we," "he" or "she" with "s/he," "his" or "her" with "h/er." I'm going to use these pronouns from here on, both for simplicity's sake and out of respect.


Two Into One We Go, 2003 - moving towards a single being composed of two identical individuals.


They became individual facets of a single, idealized being. They abandoned the concept of Self.

Lady Jaye died in 2007, and since then, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (a construct originally composed of Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer) has existed in the body of one person. S/he ("they"?) declares in interviews and on the web that Lady Jaye still exists as a living part of the pandrogenous amalgam "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge." The surgeries and hormone therapies continue, and the past few years have been busy for Gen - Throbbing Gristle have reformed and toured, MoMA has scheduled a lecture in March, 2010, and most recently, thirty years' worth of collages have been exhibited in a well-received gallery show in the Lower East Side.


Untitled (Mail art to Robert Delford Brown), 1975. Gender fluidity is hardly new to he/r.



In many ways, the concept of Self that Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is now proselytizing can be seen as an extension of the decontextualization and reframing inherent in photo collage. I'm not saying it's a 'logical' extension, but I see how spending most of one's life attempting to dismantle widely-accepted concepts - music, most notably, until now - could make one feel that the boundaries that separate people are tenuous and removable, especially when those people are in love.
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Indian Comics

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LACMA Presents First Major Museum Showing of Indian Comics




Abishek Singh (India), 'Ravan, the Demon of Lanka,' Ramayan 3392 AD, Issue 5, 2006. Pencil, ink, and watercolor (?) on paper, 24 x 17 in. Liquid Comics, Bangalore, India.

LOS ANGELES, CA. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents 'Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics,' an exhibition comprised of fifty-three paintings, works on paper, and vintage comic books, on view from October 17, 2009 through February 7, 2010. The exhibition examines the legacy of India’s divine heroes and heroines in contemporary South Asian culture through the comic book genre.

Indian comic book superheroes and their arch enemies are visualized from ancient archetypes that have long been depicted in traditional painting and sculpture, and are deeply ingrained in India’s historical imagination. In contemporary comic books, Indian gods and goddesses are modern-day superheroes, manifested on Earth to vanquish evil forces. Demons take the form of modern villains, raising havoc in today’s troubled times. Heroes and Villains, curated by Julie Romain and Tushara Bindu Gude, mines the history of the comic book in India from the 1960s through the present. It explores the evolution of early Indian comics, which were modeled on American superhero comics, through the Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories), a popular series based on traditional Indian epic literature and religious texts recounting the heroic deeds of Indian gods and goddesses.

“This is the first exhibition of Indian comics on view at a major museum,” said Romain. “Here at LACMA we have the unique opportunity to consider this contemporary art form in relation to our extensive historical collection of South and Southeast Asian art.”

Today, comic book production takes place in a global cultural context and within a multi-media framework that combines traditional hand-drawn illustrations with computer design and animation technology. The exhibition explores this process through a survey of Liquid Comics’ Devi and Ramayan series, which were inspired by heroic characters from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, and other Indian texts. Liquid Comics (formerly Virgin Comics) is an animation studio based in Bangalore.

To illustrate the continuity of the heroic narrative tradition in Indian art, a selection from LACMA’s historical collection of Indian paintings will also be on view. These include folios from Mughal illustrated manuscripts, paintings and drawings from the northern Indian princely states, and story-telling paintings from central India.
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Edward Hopper Retrospective

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Palazzo Reale in Milan Holds Edward Hopper Retrospective


MILAN.- With his paintings, Hopper paid particular attention to geometrical design and the careful placement of human figures in proper balance with their environment. He was a slow and methodical artist; as he wrote, “It takes a long time for an idea to strike. Then I have to think about it for a long time. I don’t start painting until I have it all worked out in my mind. I’m all right when I get to the easel. He often made preparatory sketches to work out his carefully calculated compositions.In this photo: Edward Hopper in Paris drawing a sketch, 1907. The Arthayer R. Sanborn Hopper Collection Trust – 2005.
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October 15, 2009

The Architecture of the Visible » Treasureland of Heroturko

The Architecture of the Visible » Treasureland of Heroturko: "
 The Architecture of the Visible

The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture By Graham Macphee
Continuum International Publishing Group 2002-07 240 Pages ISBN: 0826459269 PDF 11.7 MB

Visual technology now saturates everyday life. Theories of the visual - now key to debates across cultural studies, social theory, art history, literary studies and philosophy - have interpreted this condition as the beginning of a dystopian future, of cultural decline, social disempowerment and political passivity. This book presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film. A range of theorists - from Baudelaire to Merleau-Ponty, Debord, Benjamin, Virilio, Jameson, Baudrillard and Derrida - have explored how technology not only reinvents the visual but also changes the nature of culture itself. The heartland of all such cultural analysis has been the city, from Baudelaire's flaneur to Benjamin's Arcades. Drawing on the examples of Paris and New York - two key world cities since the 19th century - the book analyses how visual technology is revolutionising the landscape of modern thought, politics and culture.


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October 12, 2009

Feature Film: Douglas Gordon's vision of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo

FEATURE FILM Douglas Gordon's vision of Bernard HERRMANN's Vertigo : Film Music on the Web CD Reviews Sept1999: "






Book/CD/Video Review:
FEATURE FILM
Douglas Gordon's vision of Bernard HERRMANN's Vertigo















CONLON/VERTIGO Book/CD/Video Review:
FEATURE FILM Douglas Gordon's vision of Bernard HERRMANN's Vertigo


This is an extraordinary visual and audio homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo and, in particular, to Bernard Herrmann's celebrated score. Vertigo, arguably Hitch's masterpiece, has always attracted attention. Acres of text have been written about the film and its deep psychological significance. Beautifully refurbished videos of the film have been released - the latest with a documentary about the film. Varèse Sarabande recordings have included the majority of the cues, including Joel McNeely's excellent 1996 recording with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (VSD-5600).
Now James Conlon's recording, running time 74:35, which is the heart of this project, includes all the music that Herrmann wrote for the film.


The book shows Conlon conducting the Paris Opera Orchestra in this performance of Herrmann's score. Close-ups of the conductor's head and hands were filmed by Douglas Gordon's cameras. The selection of the shots from all the different cameras and the editing were all Douglas Gordon's decisions. These close-ups shots, together with deep crimson and black background dissolves, constitute the total content of the 75-minute 35mm film which is the version I saw. There is also the video installation version that exactly parallels the time of the Hitchcock film (122.5 minutes). This version shows Conlon, in frame during the musical cues, while the camera tracks through the concert hall during the unscored sequences of the film to the subliminal accompaniment of its dialogue and background noises.
The book comprises stills compiled from the film. It includes, helpfully, a few small stills from Hitchcock's film scattered at strategic points through its pages These film stills are inset within a much larger frame of the conductor's gestures. The book has the actual CD inset so that it becomes an integral part of the front cover design. Inside the pocket, a booklet contains two detailed essays by Raymond Bellour on Gordon's work and an excellent thought-provoking article by Royal S. Brown on Bernard Herrmann's score.

Review: The Film and the Book
To quote Bellour's notes …'…to take the music and only the music whose spellbinding power and prestige lend it an autonomy which the composer's quality alone cannot explain - and to match this music to images inspired by the music itself, is a turn of the screw that strikes very near to the inner madness of its source…'
The inner madness of its source. Yes, there it is, an inner madness that so many of us know in one form or another. That is why so many of us are fascinated with Vertigo because we can see our fears reflected in it. There is the fear of falling itself. This is very much a metaphor for the process of falling in love. We may fear it because we loose ourselves in it; we become vulnerable, we are made giddy by it, we drown in it. We loose control. Consider how often composers have associated love with turbulent waters and how poets have called falling in love 'a little death.' We become vulnerable, at the mercy of another. Sometimes, as in the case of Scotty, the love becomes obsessive and those that have experienced such an obsession will probably know its prolonged destruction and searing pain. Taking the psychology of the film to another level, there is a sense of both the 'Lieberstot', the love death of Wagner's Tristan & Isolde and, as Royal S Brown adroitly observes, the other side of the coin, 'Toten lieb', Death love, for Madeleine's obsession with Carlotta Valdes. There is, too, the connotation of Scotty being seen as something of 'an Orphic stalker.'
The music matches the story; it is ambivalent - full of unresolved resolutions. Aural and visual images seem to combine to form a sort of dream verging on a nightmare; in fact, Scotty's nightmare is a crucial part of the film. How many of us, I wonder, can identify with such dreams? How many of us are fascinated enough to want to see Vertigo again and again so that we might discover some clue that might help us resolve its many mysteries in order, perhaps, to resolve our own unresolved resolutions? We can wonder and wonder, but we will never know what drew and held Judy Barton to Gavin Essler or what happened to Scotty after Judy's fall, or the answers to dozens of Vertigo's arcane enigmas.
I offer all these thoughts because I believe they have a bearing on the film and book. But first, I am going to admit I know little of modern art and this film comes under that heading [The Pompidou Centre, Paris's museum of modern art figures strongly in the film's credits.] I therefore refuse to swim in shark infested waters to hazard an uninformed opinion of the film as art per se. I will therefore confine myself to making remarks about how well the film conveys the atmosphere, the intensity, the passions and the emotions of the film. After all, it is supposed to be the conductor's job to draw out all of these from his orchestra. I think this film partially succeeds on this level. Certainly, such sequences from the Hitchcock film, as the opening scene where Scotty looses his grip on the hand of the detective who falls to his death is powerfully conveyed. Conlon's quivering, folded fingers appear to be grasping on with a desperate intensity before they indicate Scotty's loosening grip. In many sequences, fluttering hands in close up, looking like frightened birds, give the impression of the sensation of falling and of a great unfathomable loss. But, of course, the conductor indicates emotions with his whole body and this is where I think the close-up technique falls down in its persistency. We only get a fraction of the communicative process. It might be the most important fraction (?) nevertheless, it is a fraction. Now Mr Conlon's reading is very good indeed as I observe below but he is young. I wonder if more might have been communicated had Mr Gordon chosen an older conductor who had lived in a more emotionally ravaged body? But, then, we might not have had such a wonderful performance!
Review: The CD
The first thing one notices is that the score is played through as one complete long cue (Douglas Gordon's decision). There are no separately screenplay-indicated cue divisions. For most people who know the film and Herrmann's score well, this will prove to be no problem for they will recognise the 'mile-posts' as they pass by. The breaks are brief and the music is remarkably seamless and works well as a complete composition in its own right.
Conlon impresses immediately with great attack and lucidity in the opening credits music and rooftops chase music. He is thoroughly involved in the music all the way through and delivers a passionate, intense reading that is very satisfying. The tower climaxes are shattering in their dynamic intensity. In contrast his hushed pianissimos are delicate and sensitive to the nuances of the screenplay. I was very impressed with his take on those muted brass chords that sound so remote, so detached - a dream within a dream. His 'Scene d'amour' is approached well and its climax terraced most convincingly. This is definitely one of the best if not the definitive reading of Herrmann's score now available on disc.
Reviewer
Ian Lace
Film and book

CD

Feature Film a book by Douglas Gordon (also includes the CD) is available from Artangel 36 St John's Lane, London EC1M 4BJ price £24:95 plus £6 postage and handling. Artangel e-mail: artangel@easynet.co.uk. In the U.S.A., the book is available, price $45 through D.A.P., 155 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10013 (phone: [212] 627-1999; fax: [212]627 9484). For any information on screenings of the 35mm version or showing of the video installation, contact Artangel.

Reviewer
Ian Lace
Film and book

CD





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Superfamous is the studio of interaction designer Folkert Gorter, primarily engaged in graphic and interactive design with a focus on networks and communities. Folkert holds a Master of Arts in Interactive Multimedia and Interaction Design from the Utrecht School of Art, faculty Art, Media & Technology, The Netherlands. He lives in Los Angeles, California."

Click on any text below to see Folkert's remarkable posts from the blog "but does it float."

but does it float