Straight From The Hip.

Tally-ho, Void! I have a label project for my Intro to Jewish Museums class and am looking for objects to write about. I was vacillating between choosing something new and exciting or sticking with old favorites (e.g. Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker). I turned my professor on to Andrea Zittel and Theo Jansen, which is enough to make me annoyingly effervescent for the rest of the day. My favorite thing in the world is getting people to jump on my bandwagon. I'd say "If only I could figure out how to get paid for doing that..." but I think I may be on a roll.

I might be doing a fundraising project with the New Center for Arts and Culture. Hopefully next spring I can enroll in that Fundraising and Philanthropy class, because there is someone who teaches that at my school. It's been a fairly spectacular week so far, what with my training at ICA Boston beginning this Friday, etcetera.

Hm. Maybe this?

"Lori Nix photographs epic scenes of destruction and grandeur, natural wonders and glittering metropolises, magnificent architecture and heroic landscapes that all have one thing in common: they're all fake." (LINK)

Okay, so I am all about the "wow" factor, but face it, no one these days bats an eyelash when you hit them with the subtlety stick. Besides, what better way to entrance people who think they live in a movie than with art that looks like a movie?

There's a Museum of My Dreams mission statement waiting to happen in this post, but I've got no time to edit or deliberate. Twenty minutes until my next class.

EDIT:

OR Miwa Yanagi? "My Grandmothers" series.

OR Daniel Rozin.

Muse-eum.

I'm allowed to post because I am all caught up with my reading (at least, the reading that is available to me right now).

Went to the ICA Boston yesterday on one of the wettest, most miserable days to take public transport ever. I think the interview went well. They seemed to perk up when I told them that I was aiming for a related career. It isn't much, but it is a start. Meanwhile, my roommate might as well have "Harvard" stamped on her forehead. She's being headhunted, and they basically told her to name her price. A-mazing.

Disheveled, wet and cold aside, the view from the fourth floor was worth the trip. One side of the building faces the river and is 99% glass. In a bleak but beautiful way, the sky, the steel, and the river were all the same color. I wonder if it's like living in snow globe during the winter.


Here's a link to Karaoke Wrong Number by Rachel Perry Welty, which is on display there. The description on the ICA Boston website reads: "Karaoke Wrong Number reveals the simultaneous connections and disconnections of contemporary life, where technology both assists and impedes communication." So my bag.


And in regards to this post, a refined list of keywords:

* a public, site-specific installation (or several) -- a video?
* video plays certain instructive "system messages"
* privacy rights (the lack thereof)
* a slick, sassy website
* some negotiation with the city THE SCHOOL
* 1984
* Walter Lippmann
* "safe, soothing" graphics, e.g. the logo for the Department of Homeland Security

I'll need to elaborate this in writing somewhere. I'm a bit scattered lately -- if anyone needs a disciplined course of instruction, it's me.

Just Not As Cool.

Back, in Boston, at 'Deis, green-eyed with envy at Virgil Griffith's grad project:

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

Still M.I.A.

50% Hedonism, 50% Getting It Done. See ya in Boston, kids!

What It Takes.

Another thing about writing: like many people who self-publish, I do it compulsively. That doesn't mean I always do it well. I keep myself in check by watching other writers who are clocking in their hours and learning to be disciplined. They're like sword-makers, thrusting their steel into the fire of their minds, folding it and beating it over and over again until their product is hard and perfect. I don't want to look like a grubby five-year old putting crayon scribbles on the fridge ("I HAS A STORY!", with a backwards "R"), so I hesitate a lot before posting. Thank God. I used to be really trigger-happy. A lot of my shitty prose is taking up space somewhere (cough cough, my Livejournal).

Speaking of time, I've been restraining my wanderlust, and have actually been getting the necessary stuff done, e.g. filling out loan applications, scholarship applications and coughing up two months of rent for my new apartment. It's been a really expensive year. For some reason, the fact that I've got a desk job tends to massively inflate my net worth in other people's eyes. All those pay stubs went to application fees, transcript fees, and travel expenses for campus visits and house-hunting, not re-creating James Bond cocktails , buying a Bardot tribute hoody or decorating with world artisan ceramics (because I'm trying to be conscientious now).

While I tick things off on my to-do list, you guys can stare at pictures of Daniel Edward's "Paris Hilton Autopsy". Imagine what it takes to inspire someone to make you the shining example of drunk driving by creating a sculpture that allows people to fondle your innards (tiara, cellphone, and chihuahua included).




More candy? Here's a piece depicting the birth of Britney's first child. Also, Banksy punks Paris on YouTube.

Something Isn't Right Here.

Oh, bunnies! Wait...

The cross-section of soil was my first clue to the wonderful abnormalities in this Josh Keyes illustration. The other pieces are more overtly mashed-up, which makes me suspect that this might have been the first in series. There's one of a lone wolf pacing a floating patch of grass, also containing a Converse All-Star sneaker and a haphazard group of traffic signs. There's also a pair of hyenas inspecting a graffiti-d mailbox. And then there are a few manicured, multi-faceted but supposedly "natural" and self-sustaining (?) stand-alone environments. I love how these are condensed versions of a "big picture" idea.

I stumbled over these at Fecal Face -- a great website, well-designed and frequently updated with lots of cool new stuff. From the Josh Keyes interview:

What is the purpose of the islands in your work?

I don't think of them as islands, though they read that way. The diagrammatic quality of my work refers to the human gaze, similar to the idea of the male gaze, it sees and takes in only what it wants to see or desires to see. The model I am using is the scientific gaze or perception. Things seen in quantity separate from the whole. A laboratory where animals, ecosystems, humans, are reduced to objects. It is a minimal playing field and something that stems from my interest in Samuel Becketts plays like Waiting for Godot, and the theater of the absurd. Though I am tempted at times to fill the entire space, I find that the minimal stage set helps to focus the attention on the narrative. I also use the minimal and segmented landscapes to bring clarity to a very complex word of events. It is a way of quieting down information. I would like to create some sculptures at some point. I have a strong fascination with the dioramas in natural history museums, they are magnificent installations.

Connect the Dots.

The Fall of Icarus, Peter Brueghel

Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

***

[Bold text for emphasis.]