What if there was nothing to discover? No story, no thousand words, no answer to a non-riddle? What if it was really, really, just a game of forms and colors?
Would it be a sin?
Does this lady need a past?
Is it really so bad for something to be “just” a pretty picture?
We know of the danger of beauty, we know the seductive spectacle means flirting with submission, yet is it really so immoral?

We possibly wouldn’t say it about Rafa? Wilk’s works. They are often witty, playful, insightful. They play with the idea of light, of bi-dimensionality, of what a work is.
But, to continue on my doubt – does having a story constitute a challenge? Or is it just because we like the indolence of layered thinking, the safety net of there being “something else”, so as to let our imagination ride a little further…? But haven’t we turned it into a rule for (a lot of) contemporary art? This story-telling capacity? (Can someone say a good story about this? If so, the author of the story and the author of the work get a bonus.)
What if it’s a pretty picture? What if it’s pretty, pretty, pretty, a thousand times pretty? What if it’s so damned pretty you don’t want it to be a story, to go beyond it being pretty?
Of course, I have the right to omit the depth. And then also, every good story is many stories deep. But some of the best works I know present a fascinating resistance to storytelling. They are like a stone, at once attractive and opaque. They make me want to read within the lines.

And here, somewhat related, is a summer holiday bonus:

What if there was nothing to discover? No story, no thousand words, no answer to a non-riddle? What if it was really, really, just a game of forms and colors?
Would it be a sin?
Does this lady need a past?
Is it really so bad for something to be “just” a pretty picture?
We know of the danger of beauty, we know the seductive spectacle means flirting with submission, yet is it really so immoral?

We possibly wouldn’t say it about Rafa? Wilk’s works. They are often witty, playful, insightful. They play with the idea of light, of bi-dimensionality, of what a work is.
But, to continue on my doubt – does having a story constitute a challenge? Or is it just because we like the indolence of layered thinking, the safety net of there being “something else”, so as to let our imagination ride a little further…? But haven’t we turned it into a rule for (a lot of) contemporary art? This story-telling capacity? (Can someone say a good story about this? If so, the author of the story and the author of the work get a bonus.)
What if it’s a pretty picture? What if it’s pretty, pretty, pretty, a thousand times pretty? What if it’s so damned pretty you don’t want it to be a story, to go beyond it being pretty?
Of course, I have the right to omit the depth. And then also, every good story is many stories deep. But some of the best works I know present a fascinating resistance to storytelling. They are like a stone, at once attractive and opaque. They make me want to read within the lines.

And here, somewhat related, is a summer holiday bonus:

Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.

The picture – entitled (…) – is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)

11 min, 16 mm film, B/W, no sound
Camera: Bill Rowley
Edit: Elaine Summers
Dir: Elaine Summers
Prod: Hans Breder, Iowa University

There are two things about this short fragment I love.
The first is the choreography of joy. The slow-motion allows us to better appreciate the flow of the common movement, the combining of the bodies, the contrast between them and everything that happens around them.
But there is something else. The dance becomes obvious at the end, when the movement continues beyond what we expected. Yet there is one earlier moment, one step of the girl coming from “our” side, which makes that clear. At a very precise point, she deviates from the way she has been running, her body bends like a bow and then moves sideways. That is when the simple vectors of meeting become something else – something more complex, less obvious. The bodies, now, create a space for our meeting to go beyond the embrace.

It is the pleasure of imagining a performance – or rather, of imagining a universe. A narrative, an aesthetics, an experience, a unity.
It is the pleasure of imagining a liveness, a directness, a presence.
The pleasure of experiencing the echo, the recording, the extract, the fragment of a copy of a copy. The pleasure Plato was so afraid of.
It is the joy of watching something on a small pixellated video image and imagining it live and juicily 3D.
It is the ecstatic moderato of my computer screen, of yours, which acts out the world that supposedly tastes better off-screen (heck, it tastes). Yet it is not off-screen, not in the performance space, but here, at this very desk, dressed in dark-green boxers, brown socks and a t-shirt, among the hills of papers and books and accompanied by the delicate sound of the washing machine and an occasional sms, that I experience it. The pleasure of absence. The ecstatic moderato.

Bloodshedding pieces of black-and-white happiness.
The unfair balance of the picture.

The wider picture. The bloody wider picture always giving it the color that wasn’t there in the first place.
Notice: the wider picture is never the first place. It comes as we back up, until we are nowhere to be found, impressed by the relation of the Thing with that wide horizon, that swift encompassing of the Other into the Thing.

The unfair balance of the picture. Nothing should ever be framed. Frames should be prohibited, forcing us into oblivion, into focusing on the End nearest us. Who knows how many Santa Clauses are necessary?

The unfair balance of the picture.

The pictures are by, in order of appearance, Diane Arbus, Miko?aj Chylak, Diane Arbus, Fischli & Weiss.

Video directed by Takafumi Tsuchiya (TAKCOM).

Two pictures from the Visit series (2007/8) by Filip Berendt.
The idea is so simple and to the point that it is irritating. Berendt put an ad in a newspaper saying he wants to make installations in people’s homes out of the things he finds there and take pictures of them. Some people answered. He went to their homes, and, well, did what he said he would do.
The series won him the Sittcomm award last year.

Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains), an ECAL graduate project by Camille Scherrer

Nothing to stop us from getting lost. From deciding we no longer belong here, and using all our knowledge and craft to make this place just confusing enough to dream.
Be it an augmented reality, be it a book, a picture that can actually be moving. Be it our imposing of what’s in our head, or rather, what dropped by for just a second, only to fool us into believing we own it, we are it.
Nothing to stop us from finding our way. With every single hesitating step we so confidently make into this our augmented reality, with more of you than I could ever have hoped for, with less of me than you would expect, with just enough of us to get the picture.
And move on. As if nothing really happened. As if.

(via)

I love the CRA$H jewellery collection by Super Fertile because it’s impossible to wear. Poor people can’t afford it. Rich people would never dare.
So who is it for?
For us, of course.