Conceptual Art

Fuck Jeff Goldblum, man! posted on July 27th, 2010

This a re-post but too good to miss.

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(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.

Miranda July’s The Hallway posted on July 15th, 2010

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YOU OBVIOUSLY KNOW WHAT SHE’S TALKING ABOUT.

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The Hallway from The Hallway on Vimeo.

How to open a bottle of wine with your shoe… posted on July 13th, 2010

…and practice your French without a corkscrew.

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Francis Alys posted on July 4th, 2010

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In Sometimes Making Something leads to Nothing (video), the artist Francis Alys pushes a block of ice through Mexico City until it melts. In When Faith Moves Mountains, (video) he convinces 500 Peruvian students to move a huge sand dune a few feet. He walks through Mexico City waving a handgun and he drizzles green paint in Palestine. Also, he walks into tornados (video). The Tate Modern opens an exhibition on Francis Alys. This guy is cool.

HAPPY PRIDE WEEK posted on July 3rd, 2010

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.”

Ssion:

Parts of a tour documentary:

Mark Pellegrino w/ Jon McCurley posted on June 18th, 2010

question posted on May 19th, 2010


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Lucy & Bart posted on March 23rd, 2010

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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.

www.lucyandbart.com

article in dazed

A Series of {Various} Small Flames posted on March 22nd, 2010

I love everything about Land of Talk, EVERYTHING! Especially their new EP “Fun and Laughter”.

When I heard from a very special someone:

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at a special place that the last song:

“A Series Of Small Flames”

was inspired by another very special someone:

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I was in love forever! Then I found this special Special SPECIAL!!!

hmmmm…

Project I’m working on now, advice and feedback very welcome! posted on November 22nd, 2009

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.

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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.