Form & Content

1. picks of contemporary art & discussions, with the occasional sprinkling of history; 2. on contemporary artists - being an artist, creative process, building creative community, seeing & sharing opportunities

[sylviala-blog]

A roundup of Banksy's latest street pieces include roving trucks and a performance piece where a Ronald McDonald statue gets his shoes shined.

The artist Banksy is not slacking during his month-long "residency" in New York.  Last week the elusive artist managed to infuriate residents (and the mayor!) with not one but two mural tributes to the World Trade Center on 9/11: one in Tribeca and one found in Brooklyn Heights. His upsetting stuff animal truck was found equally disturbing.&

[sylviala-blog]

Banksy's Sirens of the Lambs

[sylviala-blog]

Banksy Sold $225,000 Worth of Art at a Central Park Stall for $420

Banksy finds ways to stay underground when it's becoming nearly impossible for him to make anonymous wall art. While folks in Brooklyn were charging NYC art elites & hipsters to see Banksy's latest beaver stencil in their neighborhood, Banksy put out prints in an anonymous art stall, making us think yet again about what makes a piece of art valuable.

You missed it. On Saturday, Banksy set up a nondescript stall on the edge of Central Park, where he sold stencilled prints for $60 a pop. The monkey with a sign, the guy with the flowers, the rat with the smirk—all the classics were there. Too bad nobody wanted them.

[sylviala-blog]

Photography & installation by Michael Wolf bring visibility to Chinese factory workers and their work.

[sylviala-blog]

Ready to march in London for Greenpeace International's day of action to protect the arctic is a massive people-powered Pola...

[sylviala-blog]

Artist Sophia Wallace talks about her Cliteracy project, which brings language of the clit into our visual culture. 

[sophiawallace]

Some shots from the CLIT RODEO tonight. Thanks to everyone who came out to the Wassaic Project and competed. The Rodeo will also be happening tomorrow night from 9-10pm. Come out and take a ride on the SOLID GOLD CLIT! 

[sylviala-blog]

Artist Sophia Wallace brings to light the anatomy of the clit, and brings it into visibility via various art pieces, including this campy clit rodeo. Part of her Cliteracy project.

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

Chris Burden - Metropolis II (2010)

"Chris Burden’s epic kinetic sculpture is a complex and frenetic creation which took four years to complete and is a model of a miniature city with an intricate transportation system. It consists of 18 roadways, including one 6-lane freeway, train tracks, miniature cars, a network of buildings, which support the equivalent of approximately 100,000 cars circulating every hour."

[sylviala-blog]

Another mural in the works, by the Muralistas (Robin Gibson, Keith Chong & Sylvia La)

At Culture Yard, Santa Cruz, California

[sylviala-blog]

Don’t go to art school

A working artist tells it like it is.. AND offers a self-education plan that costs twenty times less than a BFA program at a prestigious school.

I’ve had it. I will no longer encourage aspiring artists to attend art school. I just won’t do it. Unless you’re given a full ride scholars…

[marianthinks-deactivated2022111]

[sylviala-blog]

Gorgeous installation from chain link fence by Soo Sunny Park. Found via This is Colossal

[sfmoma]

Thinking about a work of art as the culmination of a messy process raises an important question: at what point does art happen?

Very interesting read on Art21: Praxis Makes Perfect | Where Does the Art Happen? (via sfmoma)

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

Anya Gallaccio - Red on Green (2012) - The life and death of 10,000 red roses 

[sylviala-blog]

accumulation

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook - Two Planets/Village and Elsewhere (2008-12)

“Every life is in search of a narrative… For the storytelling impulse is, and always has been, a desire for a certain ‘unity of life’. In our own postmodern era of fragmentation and fracture…narrative provides us with one of our most viable forms of identity - individual and communal’” - Richard Kearney

“Two Planets/Village and Elsewhere is about the village (the here) and elsewhere (the there) and how stories link people across continents, cultures and even time-periods.

Rasdjarmrearnsook brought some visitors from elsewhere to her village in northern Thailand. The visitors came in the form of unfamiliar paintings and they told stories from long ago and far away: of dances in Parisian cafés, nude picnics and haymaking. These paintings by Renoir, Manet, and Van Gogh prompted the villagers to share their own stories.”

[sylviala-blog]

simple act of displacement and juxtaposition says much more about art, cultural context, power dynamics, stories.

[arpeggia]

Ana Mendieta - Imagen de Yagul from Silueta Series, 1973

[blogworks]

[sylviala-blog]

Li Wei, Live at the High Place 6

[crossconnectmag]

Gravity Defying Photography | Li Wei

Li Wei (born in 1970, Hubei, China) is a contemporary artist from Beijing, China. His work often depicts him in apparently gravity-defying situations. Wei started off his performance series, Mirroring, and later on took off attention with his Falls series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground.

His work is a mixture of performance art and photographythat creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality. Li Wei states that these images are not computer montages, but that he uses mirrors, metal wires, scaffolding and acrobatics.