(1) Can James Franco possibly be for real? (2) If he is, then—just logistically—how is all this possible? He’s just flown back from Berlin this afternoon, he says, and he has a 35-page paper due tomorrow. Next weekend he has to shoot a student film, because in two weeks he’ll be flying out to Salt Lake City to start acting in a movie called 127 Hours, director Danny Boyle’s follow-up to Slumdog Millionaire, in which Franco will play a hiker who gets pinned by a boulder and has to amputate his own arm. Revisions are due soon on his book of short stories, which will be published in October by Scribner. He’s trying to nail down the details of an art show that will be based, somehow, on his recent performance on the soap opera General Hospital. Also, he has class every day, which—since he’s enrolled in four graduate programs at once—requires commuting among Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, Morningside Heights, and occasionally North Carolina.
Nina Arsenault recently spoke at IdeaCity 2010 about her art and her body, and how she objectifies herself in the name of both. Read the whole ‘talk‘ because it’s super.
“And, I take my understanding of irony from Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. She articulates irony not simply as the idea that an image can contain an implied and literal meaning. Harraway’s deep understanding of irony is that a single image or body can contain a cascading web-like structure of seemingly contradictory yet dependent meanings that can not even be pulled apart. To do so would be to deny the truth of the greater whole.
It’s a beautiful definition of irony.
Dialectics dissolve into one another. Male into female into real into fake into beauty into abomination, worshipfulness and self-annihilation. Cascading into one another.”
Lucyandbart is a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess. In it they imagine human bodies and faces physically altered with a shocking but artistic realism. Globules of foam, asymmetric spines fascinating and repugnant simultaneously, the pictures become even more disturbing because they don’t hint at the emotional state of the subject. Each transformed human looks blankly back at you, neither horrified or surprised or excited about their change of form, but merely present and allowing it to be shown to you. It’s that sort of lucid acceptance, clearly not hiding the kind of imperfections and oddities that society mostly trains us to be ashamed of, that make staring at these ‘mutants’ even more unnerving.
These are a few images from a project that I shot this summer in Moscow. The work is about women who work in the oil and gas industry in Russia, in a variety of different roles. I am interested in showing the individuals within this huge, faceless, traditionally masculine, environmentally destructive industry. I would like to make a connection between how Russia’s economy is absolutely dependent on this resource, and how capitalist society is contingent on the unpaid work of women. I also want to explore the idea of oil and gas as materials that are in some way ancient and sacred -formed as they are deep within the earth over millions of years.
My problem is that none of this is communicated in the images! I need to activate them somehow, most probably with text (I interviewed each subject about their job, their opinions about Russian society since Perestroika, the position of women and so on), but perhaps also with some kind of sculptural element incorporating oil by-product materials…. This might be overkill though as mixing photo with other mediums can often be too much….. But even if I just use text is will have to be presented in a beautiful and sculptural way, I don’t want it just below the image like a caption….yurg. I am very confused. So if anyone has suggestions for work I should look at, or reactions to these photos -what kind of feeling you get from them etc, that would be super helpful.
