2012-04-12
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Viewfinder panorama from the Empire State Building, New York (via chriswoebken).
2012-04-11
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Phonebook documenting calls to every 765-4321 phone number in America
2012-04-09
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Untitled, Andrew Herman, 1994, from a set called ‘Printers Inc.’, “including the usual suspects (Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Gavin Turk, etc)”, posted by LinkMachineGo on Flickr. (Artist information from a comment by duncan.)
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Went to see Gilbert and George at the White Cube Bermondsey yesterday. Was quite stunned to see an idea I had scaled up to fill whole walls of a gallery
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In 2007 they were the subject of a large Tate Modern retrospective. “We felt we deserved it”, says Gilbert. “But we wanted it in the right Tate, not the wrong Tate.”
“Every English artist who has a show in Tate Britain is finished two weeks later,” says Gilbert. “It’s the kiss of death. If you have Tate Modern, then the other one must be Tate Old-Fashioned. They’re trying to say that they don’t really believe in British modern art.”
”2012-04-08
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Sam Griffin, on his artwork The Olduvai Cliff:
“This crypt finds its visual focal point in a neon outline of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Projection - the flattened version of the polyhedral shape created by the mathematician to display a map of the world. Here it is re-purposed as a religious symbol, geometric shorthand for Fuller’s holistic acknowledgement of the finite nature of natural resources.”
(via iamdanw, Dymaxion map poster extraordinaire). (See also: a Dymaxion map of human migration from east Africa.)
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Getty Images at Daylife:
An employee poses between a 1978 embroidery work entitled ‘Aerei’ (Aeroplanes) (R) and a 1989 embroidery of the same title by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti at the Tate Modern in central London on February 27, 2012. The Tate Modern will present an exhibition of Boetti’s work titled ‘Game Plan’, from February 28 to May 27, 2012.
2012-04-07
The Creators Project and the New Aesthetic
This week has seen an explosion of writing about James Bridle’s new-aesthetic project (if one may call it that), from Bruce Sterling’s essay, through calls to politics, references to art history, and riffs on music. Finally, today, there was a collection of responses from several artists on the Creators Project blog (as referenced here earlier).
I found that interesting, because when I visited the Creators Project show in San Francisco in the middle of March, I found it one of the biggest outbreaks of new-aesthetic I’ve seen in a while; probably since decode at the V&A in late 2009 (although Talk To Me definitely had its moments too). In particular, there were a number of works - Strata #4 by Quayola and Overscan by Sosolimited spring to mind - that seem to me to really sum to embody parts of the NA “thing”, whatever it is.
Strata #4 is a work that uses scans of Flemish classics in the collection of the Palais de Beaux Arts in France as a starting point for an animation based on polygonal deformations. It’s probably easier to watch the video, but it certainly ties in to the sort of low-res rendering some have connected with NA. Meanwhile, Overscan was easy to overlook, as it’s designed for a bar, not an exhibition space. It consists of five screens, one showing live TV, with the other four processing that data in different ways: showing visualisations based on word usage (from the closed captioning / subtitles), face detection, image manipulation, and so on. It’s a lovely piece that, like Strata #4, is easier to watch than describe.
That’s just two of the dozen or so projects that were on display, which (naturally) varied in quality, longevity, and impact, but which generally felt like some sort of now, if not some kind of future. Some of the friends I went with were annoyed that the event had been bundled with talks and music, but I think my regret was that this wasn’t an exhibition that ran for a couple of months in a museum (SFMOMA, or perhaps San Jose’s Museum of Art) so that there would be time for word of mouth to get people interested.
Perhaps the point of this is that the collection of new-aesthetic works and influences on Tumblr is a recognition that this stuff is already out there, and that if a curator (as in, someone actually employed by a museum, as opposed to the looser internet definition) decided to organise an exhibition at an established venue, the work needed would be out there. There’s already a movement- it just didn’t have a name.
2012-04-04
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Queen of Swords: Drones, from the Hexen 2.0 Tarot deck by Suzanne Treister:
HEXEN 2.0 looks into histories of scientific research behind government programmes of mass control, investigating parallel histories of countercultural and grass roots movements. HEXEN 2.0 charts, within a framework of post-WWII U.S. governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and increased intelligence gathering, and implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society.
Hexen 2.0 is on show at the Science Museum, London, until 1 May 2012. (Thanks, Kevan.)
