Good For Your Bones

art is a part of you

[rachelrushing]

The reigning ideology would have the artist be a loner, imagining him solitary and irredentist: "writing is always done alone" , "we have to take refuge behind the world", blah, blah, blah... This rather naïve imagery muddles two quite different notions: the artist's refusal of the communal rules currently in force, and the refusal of the collective. If we must reject all manner of imposed communalism, it is precisely to replace it by invented relational networks.

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics

[mexandthecity]

M&TC:

“My head says GYM but my heart says TACOS” - story of our life 

[rachelrushing]

A

[bookpickings]

Leisure the Basis of Culture

Josef Pieper

In 1948, an obscure German philosopher penned a magnificent manifesto for the value of leisure as a way of reclaiming our human dignity amid a workaholic culture. Today, his wisdom is timelier than ever:

[mexandthecity]

M&TC: WCW Style Marmalade 

Created by Victoria Villasana, born in Mexico currently based in London, England. She collaborates with numerous international brands, artists photographers and designers.

Shown above are her embroidery photos inspired mainly by Mexican folk and indegenous craftsmanship. “Remembering our origins, that natural understanding of things. We have a lot to learn from indegenous cultures around the world..”

SM was shortlisted by Cosmopolitan as one of the best new fashion blogs and has been featured in popular magazines such as MTV,  Style.com, New York Times, Vogue, Elle, Societe Perrier and many more online and print publications.

For any enquiry regarding the above and/or sponsorship, kindly contact: [email protected]

Follow her on tumblr stylemarmalade

[hyperallergic]

PHILADELPHIA — Talking about the limitations of photography, painter David Hockney said that art “must deeply involve an observer whose body somehow has to be brought back in.” At the time, he was pessimistic about the medium’s possibilities.

Enter Barbara Kasten.

Barbara Kasten’s Slippery Analog Photography

[artandsciencejournal]

In Vitro (2015)

In Vitro by Aljaž Celarc is a work that explores the cyclical nature of our water resources. Celarc, a recent Masters of Photography graduate from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, created a continuous system where ice melted to water, and then that water was filtered to a freezer where it was reformed within a 3D printed mold. 

Each cycle takes about 40-60 hours to complete and then the work continues again. Though In Vitro seems to focus on everlasting rebirth, the artist notes that each time the work goes through the cycle a bit of the material escapes through repetitive exposure. Eventually, the work will just disappear. 

[hyperallergic]

Since the outset of his career, Bernar Venet has been an inveterate experimentalist, an intrepid worker in a surprising variety of media. “People know my sculptures, of course,” he says, most likely referring to the monumental steel arcs that have garnered him international renown, “but they don’t know my paintings, my photographs, my films, my poetry and the music I have made. I work in all these different areas because I’m never satisfied.” Fittingly enough, the first piece in Apoétiques: 1967-1998, a multilingual collection of his conceptual writing, asserts a salutary dissatisfaction with poetry and an uncompromising desire to transform its very makeup. Published in Geneva in 1999 by Mamco (Musée d’art moderne et contemporain), the book begins, “Il n’ya a qu’un moyen de faire avancer la poésie / C’est de donner tort à la poésie constituée / Autant dire de changer sa constitution [There is only one way to advance poetry / It is to invalidate how poetry is constituted / This is to say to change its constitution.]”

The Languages of Bernar Venet’s Conceptual Poetry

[hyperallergic]

Christie Blizard‘s paintings have been on national television more than a dozen times in the past year. Millions of viewers in the US have seen her work on Good Morning America (GMA) and The Today Show, though they may not have realized that what they were seeing was contemporary painting. As part of her ongoing interest in devising alternative ways of making and displaying paintings, outside of conventional art contexts — from incorporating mud-wrestling into her process to spray-painting canvases strapped to her back while she takes hours-long walks — the San Antonio–based artist has been creating enigmatic text works to brandish in the backgrounds of the popular morning shows for the past year.

The Painter Infiltrating ‘Good Morning America’ and ‘The Today Show’

[hyperallergic]

For 12 to 13 hours, New York City–based artist Sarah Cameron Sunde stands stock-still in the sea, surrendering herself to nature’s forces, from the rocking of waves to extreme temperatures. Walking into the water at low tide, she remains by the shore until the next low tide, confronting the gradual rising and ebbing of a full tidal cycle. Her efforts are for “36.5 / a durational performance with the sea,” an ongoing project she has previously brought to the coasts of Maine, Mexico, and San Francisco to draw awareness to and illustrate the acceleration of sea-level rise. Today marked the end of its most recent iteration, which Sunde performed about 10 miles north of the Hague at the Oude Rijn river in Katwijk, and she is planning future performances with the goal of covering all six livable continents.

Faced with a Rising Tide, Artist Lets It Wash Over Her

[literaryliberal]

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, ‘She doesn’t have what it takes.’ They will say, ‘Women don’t have what it takes.’

Clare Booth Luce (via literaryliberal)

[rachelrushing]

[rachelrushing]

Apparently white men still write art history.

Land and Environmental Art Edited by Jeffrey Kastner Survey by Brian Wallis

Aside from the almost humorous lack of discussion about women artists, this survey hit home for my personal work in a lot of ways. The editor breaks down this type of art into five categories, Integration, Interruption, Involvement, Implementation, and Imaging.

The survey begins with a description of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro including the outlandish goals of the summit, the colonial tensions amongst inhabitants of the Souther Hemisphere, and the Greenpeace banner on Sugar Loaf Mountain with a graphic of the Southern Hemisphere of the Earth and labels reading SOLD and VENDIDO. Wallis also brings up Mark Dion’s installation A Meter of Jungle in which Dion assumes the character of a naturalist and sets up a section of jungle floor in the Museum of Contemporary Art. Bringing a section of the Earth into the museum provided a “change in context from the original locale to the museum (and) was meant self-consciously to mimic the imperialistic basis of natural history itself.” (23) The only problem I have with this reference is that bringing in a white American to talk about this just reinforces that imperialistic attitude. I don’t mean to imply that Dion can’t make work that he wants to, but that for this survey to honor the post-colonial attitude of the times, Wallis shouldn’t have begun his survey with a white man.

Wallis goes on to discuss Earthworks and Postmodernism. There are a few key points I really appreciate. I enjoy the discussion of a movement or generation of artwork that resists acquisition, David Pepper’s assertion of “natural rights”, and the acknowledgement that much of the Earthworks exhibition consisted of photographs of work that could not be scaled or transported to fit within the gallery.

Reading this survey was a very conflicting experience because there are some many ideas in here that I have been needing to verbalize or have clarified for my own work, and yet the whole time there seemed to be a thread of contradiction running through the pages. Wallis quotes Smithson in his discussion of Nature and nature.

Secondly, Smithson argued that despite their apparent subject, earthworks had little to do with conventional notions of landscape or nature. ‘The desert’, he wrote, ‘is less “nature” than concept, a place that swallows up boundaries’. Finally, Smithson claimed that ‘the more compelling artists today are concerned with “place” or “site”. By this Smithson meant not only specific overlooked locations, but also a conceptual relation between viewers and boundaries, inside and outside, centre and periphery. (26)

This shifting of perspective from the desert being a place of “nature”, which in this case I apply the meaning of wildness, otherness, and non-humanness where processes and cycles reign supreme, to a concept of openness and freedom presents the same problem that Wallis later addresses with Thoreau. On page 35 he discusses the ‘ideal lyricism’ of Thoreau’s perspective on Nature, which American artists were skeptical and suspicious of. And yet the conceptual openness and lack of boundaries that Smithson advocates of the desert rings familiar to the “romantic strain of transcendentalism” of Thoreau. These are both white men coming into a Wild State to declare their own identity and the identity or purpose of the State they are in. This just wreaks of White Privilege and Colonialism.

The role of women in this movement seems to also be glossed over. The main mentions of women include the acknowledgment of Nancy Holt as Smithson’s wife, 2 paragraphs on second-wave feminist theory, and a discussion of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Even though Wallis briefly mentions Holt and Jeanne-Claude, the only feminist artist whose work he describes is Mary Beth Edelson. Wallis says her work “typifies the impulse among some feminist artists of the 1970s to combine myths, dreams, and spiritual images in rituals that referred to nature and earth goddesses.” (34) This description is more annoying than enlightening. I find “typified” references to feminist art boring and shallow, especially when included in a “survey” of any larger art genre or movement. Considering how long and in-depth Wallis goes to talk about other works by Smithson, Long, De Maria, Beuys, and others, the description of a female artist’s work as “impluse” is base and insulting. Eventually Wallis brings up Ukeles and her work with the New York City Sanitation Department. Maybe this is just me wanting to dislike the weak inclusion of women in this survey, but the discussion of Ukeles’ work almost seems like someone read a draft of this survey and said, “Dude, you gotta include at least 2 women in this or people will lose their shit.”

Again, aside from another art historical survey being written from the perspective of a privileged white man, I really enjoyed this read. The framing of a shift towards Postmodernism through the lens of Land Art is revealing and relevant to the way I want to move forward in my own work. Phrases like “a geography of difference”, “natural processes as metaphors for the spatial structure of social systems”, “necessary aesthetics”, “spatial practices”, “ a new awareness of the vitalism of public sites, an interest in reclaiming lost or suppressed histories”, and “alluding to a poststructuralism where meaning and power are not determined by a single dominant viewpoint” excite and inspire me. I’ll end with a quote from Foucault on page 40 about the hope of symbolic artistic action.

Develop action, thought and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition and disjunction [and] to prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

[rachelrushing]

69°S. Explores Antarctica at the BAM 2011 Next Wave Festival

The alien remoteness of Antarctica has probably never been better depicted on stage than in 69°S., a marionette theatre experience presented at the BAM 2011 Next Wave Festival by performance ensemb...

[rachelrushing]

When Guerrilla Art Goes Awry, Keep the Cameras Rolling

BRUSSELS — 7 Square Metres (2013) didn’t set out to explore the subject of failure. Belgian artist Karl Philips’s first documentary film was supposed to record the complex implementation of a site-...

[ashoutintothevoid]

[fukgirl-deactivated20150602]

  Emma Sulkowicz is on the cover of this month’s New York Magazine and that is the coolest thing wow

[hyperallergic]

(via A Talk With Christopher Kardambikis, Artist’s Book Enthusiast)

Every great museum has at least a few vitrines dedicated to the remarkable object that is the artist’s book. Since the poet William Blake illustrated Songs of Innocence and Experience in the late 18th century, artists ranging from Matisse to Ed Ruscha have approached the medium with reverence.

READ MORE

[hyperallergic]

(via Why Artworks Are Like People)

Ever since critic and theorist Walter Benjamin penned his landmark essay in 1936, it’s been accepted as a kind of common wisdom that the aura of the artwork has withered in the (never-ending) age of mechanical reproduction. But a new study suggests the aura hasn’t vanished entirely yet, and perhaps it never will.

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