CocoRosie and their insulated world

I watched two interviews with CocoRosie and was struck by their disconnected behavior, as if somehow in their connection to each other and their art-music, they are unable/disinterested in connecting with the rest of the world. As a being who is interested in connecting to as many others in the world as possible, and doing so intentionally, I was disappointed to feel this disconnect from them. I love many of their songs, but did not love this. Watch them here, in order:

The first (can't embed).

The second:

They speak of their desire to insulate themselves from the world, create a private space, to make their music from. And this "artists as isolationists" belief is a thread that runs through all time and into the current moment. But I disagree with it heavily now. I do not see it as responsible to create art out of that space. I see it as intentional obliviousness. Willful ignorance of the scope of events going on in the world today. To me, artists, musicians, cultural creators, have an obligation to inform themselves of the contemporary world and history, of philosophy and realities, and then make their new works to further the dialogue or illuminate a problem, or even the best, solve one!

Art, music, culture, is our gift to the world and if we use it only to distance ourselves, or mock the present world as is, we are mis-using our gifts. We are taking advantage of capitalism to support our selfishness. We are feeding our egos.

A very bright article in the New York Times today, by Holland Cotter, has inspired me to think with optimism on how the art world can become. How this economic upheaval can create a whole new way of thinking and making. It's beyond inspiring. Read his absolutely articulate, wise article, "The Boom Is Over. Long Live The Art!" here.

Happy Birthday Jackson Pollock

In honor of Jackson Pollock, and with deliberate attention towards the fun of creating inky drip paintings on a web page far surpassing the fun of reading Pollock's fairly troubled biography, I post this: Make your own drip paintings!

1968 Mexico Olympics Poster

In researching for work, I found this op-art-ed out fly poster by Lance Wyman from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. You can purchase it from the Victoria & Albert Museum Shop in the UK here. Lance Wyman's graphics for the 1968 Olympics are across the board righteous. See more of his design work on his website. To see especially his Mexico City Olympics graphics, click on the Mexico Olympics logo near the middle.

Lady Gaga, that's some good fashion

Why I gotta love this so much? The guilt. But I do.

Animal Collective's video for "My Girls"

D-dang. Sometimes there is a thing that at first you wish would hurry up and get over with, but then it drags you in slowly, submerges you in its soupy washing machine brand of lovemaking and suddenly you're like, "I like this!" in a way that surprises even you.

I guess that just happened to me, with this:

Terapeak!

I never sell things on eBay so I'm discovering Terapeak a bit late, but I love it.

I just went on eBay to list a Dansk pepper mill that I bought here in Austin. I typed in "Dansk pepper mill" in the Terapeak search engine that's hosted on the eBay main page. Terapeak analyzed the last three weeks of Dansk pepper mill eBay auctions and said the average value they sold for was $80, and the 26 sold in the last three weeks sold for between $0 and $411. Yes. Thank you simplicity.

And thank you to the Terapeak nerds who thought up such a smart, smart creature of software.

Luzinterruptus's Recent Installation in Madrid

I just saw Luzinterruptus's January 5th installation around Madrid, Acomodate y Lee, on Art MoCo and spent more time looking at the photos on their blog. Each installation consisted of a blue light, most (all?) with antique lampshades, and a book on a string. They were little reading nooks carved out all over the city. The reading nooks were installed in niches as odd as a condom machine, or as clear as next to homeless person's bedroll on the sidewalk.

A very interesting intervention. I'm always drawn to private space insertions into public space or transformation of public space into private. This is a fairly well thought out one. Their other work is equally competent and alluring. Check it out on their blog.

Dang, Coroflot!

There is some seriously persuasive design on Coroflot right now. Coroflot is a portfolio, networking and resume site. The site connects creative professionals with design jobs worldwide. It's a rewarding, fleshy little (big) website.

My friend Blake Almstead, a student in the Cranbrook 2D department, has some of his work on Coroflot. I'm especially drawn to his projection piece on vellum, Binocular Dystopia. Remarkably appealing texture, hint of interrogation video, great scale and choice of materials. Well done Blake.

Coroflot allows you to sort by "most likeys," specialities, most popular this week, and new members. It's a great format and I'll be perusing it like an elitist aesthete stalker for weeks, no doubt.

Bill Massie's American House 08

Bill Massie, head of Architecture at Cranbrook, has designed and built a beautifully lyrical, modern, pre-fab home called the American House 08.


Above is a photo from the Cranbrook website, of the house during assembly.

In its finished state, walls undulate and light glows from porous segments. Texture, material and form interplay. The roof dips down becoming a seat (the truest extension of A Pattern Language's suggestion that part of a roof be reachable from human height).

The American House 08 was installed on the lawn of the Cranbrook Art Museum, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, this summer during an exhibition at the museum, on Massie's work.

When I was a student at Cranbrook, Bill Massie gave a lecture on his work and discussed the intricacy of the development of his designs. His process is unique in that he owns a warehouse in Pontiac, Michigan (a formerly thriving auto manufacturing town that now has seen better days, like most of Michigan) in which he is able to assemble his designs in pieces and walk through them, spending significant time in them as he goes along. This allows the flexibility of experiencing the space in 1:1 scale, and making changes, as you create it; a smart and necessary idea to me.

An article with great photos of the finished American house 08 is featured in the current issue of Dwell magazine.

The Cranbrook Architecture Department is a fifteen person crew of some great, creative architecture heads; there's a lot of interesting experimentation and materials research going on there. Bill Massie, as the department's Artist-In-Residence (department head), certainly leads this effort well.

Joshua Allen Harris Street Art Piece

This street art piece by Joshua Allen Harris makes me nostalgic for New York. I only feel that way because I miss casual encounters with intelligent art. Notice the folks on the street who just happen to be walking by and get to have their day marked by stumbling upon these inflatable pieces on the street.




It would be interesting to create a similar thing in Austin, based on Town Lake/Lady Bird Lake. Perhaps the flow of the water could push kinetic sculptures, or the sun could heat up air inside an inflatable causing it to expand and contract.

The Graffiti Abatement Program here is very quick to paint over all the graf art and street art murals that get painted up around town, but street art pieces that are three -dimensional would perhaps be more enduring.

Thank goodness for the internet and the oddness it cherishes.

image above is from hel-looks.com

On Halloween a girl took a picture of me and said "before you know it, you'll be an internet meme." I'm not one yet but there seem to be a million other internet fashion beings out there rocking memes.

The profusion of internet sites documenting out-there (and yet mainstream) contemporary fashion is real. Lookbook.nu is a compendium of photos of outfits submitted by stylists and clothing nerds from around the world. It's an invite-only site, but one can also apply to be part of the site. The invite/apply part is an interesting creation that I'm sure has generated some cravings amongst folks wanting exclusivity. In general though, there are some amazing and interesting things going on on Lookbook, especially for these amped-experimental-fashion starved Austin eyes.

Connected to LookBook, I found HEL LOOKS, a similar website though all the photos are taken by one person. On HEL LOOKS I found the coolest 11 year old fashionista of the world. Note that she says her hat is from a rock festival in China. She is either a very old soul or has some super cool parents. Perhaps she is the combined mixture of the reincarnated souls of Mama Cass, Janis Joplin and Gianni Versace. With self-awareness around fashion like this, how could she not be?

East Austin Studio Tour Recommendations

Of the art I saw yesterday on the East Austin Studio Tour, I was most impressed with the work of Yale MFA grad and San Marcos, TX-dweller, Annie Simpson. She's a guest in the studios on Bolm Road this weekend.

The work Annie is showing at the Bolm studios is all maritime, figurative, and extremely well-made. The video above, from her website, is a great introduction to what you'll see. Annie Simpson's work at the Bolm studios includes intricate pencil drawings of ships, oil paintings of ship captain-esque hot lezzies, and large black and white oil paintings of waves. All the work is oceanic in some form except a patterned pink and green canvas that Annie threw in for fun. Her mastery of the craft of painting is abundantly evident and I highly recommend going to see her work.

Other highlights of the tour include:

-Basically all the Big Medium artists, (on Bolm Rd) with the biggestmedium nod to Joseph Philips' paintings/drawings of remaining wilderness being hemmed in and propped up by plywood in the emptiness of white voids.

-Emily Hoyt and Debra Broz (with an emphasis on her revised porcelain figurines actually), both at the Pump Project Art Complex.

-Most of the work at the MASS gallery on Springdale, with a huge special emphasis on a collaborative piece by Anthony Romero and another artist involving hair, orange flowers and a contact paper covered box that seemed to reference a speaker box. It was a fucking gem of greatness. That's my review.

-Co-Lab_A New Media Project Space, had a fun, collaborative piece going on if you want to get to make some art in the midst of looking at so much.

As a sidenote, this google map of E.A.S.T. is just so good looking.
Out to see more today.

Adrienne Brabham is nice and different.

detail
Originally uploaded by niceisdifferent

Adrienne Brabham, an Austinite living outside Detroit and attending Cranbrook Academy of Art, has just started Nice is Different, a blog for her work. Her etsy store already features small items of her work for purchase: felt pins, drawings and fabric-art wall-pieces, etc.

Now, her larger, Cranbrook, studio work is up for view. She's only posted one piece so far, but it's worth investigating further. A conglomeration of small drawings on paper and fabric, the wall worth of installation is a beautiful representation of Adrienne's unique aesthetic rubric. Soak it up with your eyes!

Adrienne's sweetie, Scott, is the lead singer of the local indie dance band the Black and White Years. The band has a show coming up at Emo's on December 11th. Go see them and dance. The B&WY go on at the Independent Workforce Christmas Party that night at 8:20 pm.

Renewal Where Once Was Rust

This is a late re-post and a worthy one; the green revitalization of the American manufacture industry needs to be discussed and furthered at all possible junctures. When I lived outside of Detroit last fall it was apparent the cars there were dying breeds, weighty American dinosaurs. An innovative, ecologically-efficient vision was needed. That vision could save the auto economy and thousands of jobs. I'm grateful the bigger wigs finally got the idea as well. Here's to sustainable invention permeating our society, moving us all forward with its lift.

Link to the November 1st, 2008 New York Times article "A Splash of Green for the Rust Belt."

Soil Lamp

Dutch Design Week is this week in Eindhoven, Netherlands. One design in particular stood out to me as a genius creation and a gratifying reminder of the need for intelligent creativity in contemporary times. The Soil Lamp, designed by Marieke Staps, runs on mud.

From the designer:

Support this designer! The implications of this lamp are great. One can imagine a whole household full of lights running solely on energy created by microorganisms, and even larger appliances running on compost, running on decomposition, passively working for us and for the environment. The lamp is a lovely design as well. The aesthetics of this lamp on their own would be ample to encourage me to buy it, but knowing what it does, makes me want to seek it out across the ocean and get one. The lamp is not yet available for sale, and seems to be still in a prototype stage. The direction Marieke Staps is headed is a great one, and clearly ripe with opportunities. Mocoloco has more coverage of the work at Dutch Design Week.

Artists & Intuitive, Collective Simulacra

In the past couple of months, I have discovered versions of things I have made, especially things I made at Cranbrook, popping up on the internet made by the hands of others. There's a sense that certain memes run through our culture in undercurrents and it is we, the artists, the simultaneous creators and dissectors of culture, who tap into them. In some cases, the end artistic products appear identical, as though we were exposed to each others work and replicated it without thought. However, in many of these same cases (my Migration project and the design image below for example), art works were made in the seclusion of a studio, as insertions into culture, not replications of things we artists had already seen. This further emphasizes my thought that we're all inadvertantly, intuitively creating collective simulacra.

Examples follow. Below the images, I've reposted the Wiki definition of simulacrum, especially in relation to philosophy because I find that to be the most textured definition.

First, we have my Migration project and Taschide's veneer wall stickers from left to right. Below that, we have another part of my Migration project, a little video Tim made.:

Next we have a piece I made last fall. I made a few pieces in this series and they were all investigations of patterning through wall drawings and drapings of chain on the wall. Here's one example from me and then Sarah Cihat's porcelain with Michael Miller's chainwork around it rocking the same design meme:

To be continued....

Simulacrum in philosophy

The simulacrum has long been of interest to philosophers. In his Sophist, Plato speaks of two kinds of image-making. The first is a faithful reproduction, attempted to copy precisely the original. The second is distorted intentionally in order to make the copy appear correct to viewers. He gives an example of Greek statuary, which was crafted larger on top than bottom so that viewers from the ground would see it correctly. If they could view it in scale, they would realize it was malformed. This example from visual arts serves as a metaphor for philosophical arts and the tendency of some philosophers to distort truth in such a way that it appeared accurate unless viewed from the proper angle.^[6] Nietzsche addresses the concept of simulacrum in The Twilight of the Idols, suggesting that most philosophers, by ignoring the reliable input of their senses and resorting to the constructs of language and reason, arrive at a distorted copy of reality.^[7] Modern French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. Where Plato saw two steps of reproduction — faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum) — Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality, (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatever.” Baudrillard uses the concept of god as an example of simulacrum.^[8] In Baudrillard’s concept, like Nietzsche’s, simulacra are perceived as negative, but another modern philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the avenue by which accepted ideals or “privileged position” could be “challenged and overturned.”^[9] Deleuze defines simulacra as "those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance."^[10]

Adaptable Shelves, Design by Errazuriz

Most of this blog has been about politics, as is the predominant drama of the day, but here's a brief break.

"Repisa N5," foldable shelves designed by witty Chilean/British artist & designer, Sebastian Errazuriz. The shelves fold up and down to save space. I find them beautiful and elegantly thought out. Errazuriz designed this work for Cristina Grajales Inc.

I highly recommend looking at Errazuriz's personal website, the rest of his oeuvre is incredible. Most especially, I find the whole "Out" series, under the Unclassifiable Limited Editions, to be brilliant. I would include images here but his site is all Flash.