“Meaningless work is obviously the most important and significant art form today. The aesthetic feeling given by meaningless work can not be described exactly because it varies with each individual doing the work. Meaningless work is honest. Meaningless work will be enjoyed and hated by intellectuals – though they should understand it. Meaningless work can…
Read More┐ The Seventh Continent is everywhere └
┐ Assaf Shaham – in the gap between the comma and its following letter └
© Assaf Shaham, Untitled, from the series Time After Time and Again “The work Time after Time and Again deconstructs photography into its components and reassembles them on one surface that encompasses the essence of the photographic act, the fundamentals of color photography, and the marvel that combines light and time into a photograph. At…
Read More┐ Terike Haapoja – mind over matter over mind └
© Terike Haapoja, Anatomy of Landscape, Durational images, 2 parts, 2008 Glass, plywood, live plants, light, electronic, water, 150 cm x 90 cm x 20 cm When one stands before a landscape, two lines of thought appear. One treats the landscape as a framed fragment of our field of vision, distanced plane of forms and…
Read More┐ Yanai Toister – Toward a Brief Manifesto on Photography └
© Yanai Toister, Bouy (From Register of Facts), 2004, C-print, 156/120 cm © Yanai Toister, Untitled (from Straits), 2002, C-print, 80/100 cm © Yanai Toister, Untitled (from Straits), 2002, C-print, 65/80 cm “In order to formulate a binding stand with regard to the photographs in the exhibition, one must first acknowledge that the word “photography”…
Read More┐ If the erect penis is not ‘wholesome’ enough to go into museums it should not be considered ‘wholesome’ enough to go into women └
© Robert Mapplethorpe, portrait of Louise Bourgeois, 1982 “Nearly a decade later, Fillette would figure prominently in a photographic portrait of Bourgeois by Robert Mapplethorpe. The portrait, in which the (then-) seventy-year-old artist smiles mischievously for the camera while carrying the sculpture in the crook of her arm, was commissioned by the Museum of Modern…
Read More┐ Donald Goddard and Hannah Wilke – Love made possible └
All reproductions of Hannah Wilke’s work were removed due to copyrights issues. Here’s the link to her virtual home. © Hannah Wilke, My Country tis of thee, 1975 “Lil Picard: I see you are a collector of Art Deco objects. Why? Hannah Wilke: I’ve always collected things. Objects have always been important for me. But…
Read More┐ The blind man and his visual clarity └
© João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva Terence Koh, God, 2007. View of the performance at de Pury & Luxembourg, Zurich. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin. Installation view of Terence Koh (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, January 19–May 27, 2007). Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins © Hiroshi Sugimoto, Self-portrait, 2003 © Hiroshi Sugimoto, from…
Read More┐ The turning point: Coyote, American ™└
© Katie Innamorato, Coyote Terrarium, Coyote skin, foam, LEDs, clay, moss, glass, plastic, 9vt battery This photograph by Caroline Tisdall is from Joseph Beuys: Coyote, a 1976 book documenting Joseph Beuys’ 1974 performance art piece, Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me, in which the artist spent three days and nights caged with a…
Read More┐ La Guerre au Mali… lost for words └
FP/Getty Images: ISSOUF SANOGO How deceiving pictures can be. This is: Two young fighters of the Islamist group Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) walk in the streets of Gao on July 17, 2012. A group of armed youths has arrived in Gao from Burkina Faso, joining hundreds of other young African…
Read More┐ Micael Nussbaumer & The Weaving Factory – chaos as creative force └
© Micael Nussbaumer, from “Tempo Imprime no Espaço” (lit. translation: Time prints in Space), installation © Micael Nussbaumer, “Desfiar”, installation, several different documents from the abandoned Fábrica da Fiação de Tomar (The Weaving Factory), 2010 © Micael Nussbaumer, video stills, from “O Registador”, 2010 “Each video depicts an intervention in the abandoned space of Fábrica…
Read More┐ Eureka! self-portrait after Yunchul Kim └
excerpt from: © Yunchul Kim, self-portrait.jpg, ink on paper, 90 X 140 em; 58,806 single handwritten characters, 2004. “…when I deal with art after the media I do not mean art that can exist without media. Such art is no longer conceivable for me. Rather, I refer to artistic praxis that has passed through the…
Read More┐ The “hau” of dead birds └
© Eric Slayton, Nude wtih Hawk, from the series Fauna and Flora, 2000 © Eric Slayton, Colaptes Auratus, from the series Ornithological Study, 2003 © Eric Slayton, Accipiter Gentilis, from the series Ornithological Study, 2003 © Sofia Silva, Pheasants IR, 2007 More of Eric Slayton’s work here “But Hertz had also found—I discovered it amongst…
Read More┐ Hickey’s beauty by Laurie Fendrich, highly recommended └
© Alex and Felix, Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais “Everybody, it seems, is writing about Dave Hickey, but nobody’s really concentrating on the 74-year-old maverick art critic’s thorny, profound ideas about beauty. That is understandable. After decades of lambasting the academic side of the art world for institutionalizing mediocrity, and after…
Read More┐ one little, two little, three little fingers, how many do we need to pull? └
You people who read this blog know that it is unusual for me to make a post about something that I don’t like or to make a negative and/or non constructive criticism (even if by sublimation) about something that I first choose to display. I will, for once (?), use this author’s images in order…
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┐ Africa in its primitivist discourse, (obviously) as seen by the west └
© Rotimi Fani-Kayode, The Golden Phallus, 1989 © Rotimi Fani-Kayode © Zebra Katz, photo by Alison Brady © Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bronze Head, 1987 © Jane Alexander, The Butcher Boys, 1985-86. “If, however, the Tate Modern were an institution working beyond the smug reflex of Western museological authority, it would have found right in its own…
Read More┐ Nadia Sablin └
© Nadia Sablin, all photographs from the series Alehovshchina: Two Sisters “In 1952, my grandfather began to lose his vision as a result of being wounded in WWII. Wanting to return to the place where he grew up, he found an unoccupied hill in a village in the Leningrad region of Russia, close to his…
Read More┐ Philippe Dubois, “Post-Photographie et Post-Cinéma: Que devient la question du temps dans l’image contemporaine?” @ FBAUL └
video of the conference here
Read More┐ the patriarchal fantasy of control └
© Max Ernst, The Roaring of the Ferocious Soldiers (Le Mugissement des feroces soldats). 1919 “Indeed, the apparent sadism of the photographs raised the specter of surrealist misogyny; but it also pointed to an adjacent issue no less difficult: are these surrealist transgressions of the body related to actual transgressions of the body during the…
Read More┐ Contemporary housekeeping or How to stumble on a stove └
© Catherine & Harriet Beecher, in American Woman’s Home, 1869 © family archive © Erica Brejaart, Untitled, from the series Portraits of Mothers and Housewives © Erica Brejaart, Untitled, from the series Portraits of Mothers and Housewives “In the Divine Word it is written, “The wise woman buildeth her house.” To be “wise,” is “to…
Read More┐ Gaëtan Gatian de Clerambault └
© Gaëtan Gatian de Clerambault, photographs taken between 1914 and 1918, while C was in Morocco recuperating from a war wound. “…consider the relation of this figure to the photographs taken by Clerambault. Does this historical fantasy of colonial cloth underlie his photographs? Do we see in them not, as some of them seemed earlier…
Read More┐ Yayoi Kusama └
© Yayoi Kusama, Silver Squid Dress, 1968-9 © Yayoi Kusama, Self-Portrait, 1962 © Yayoi Kusama, Horse Play © Yayoi Kusama, Self-Obliteration By Dots, 1968. Photo © Hal Reiff © Yayoi Kusama, photography copyright © Harrie Verstappen “Rather than confirming the ontological coherence of the body-as-presence, body art depends on documentation, confirming-even exacerbating-the supplementarity of the body…
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