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.
Two gorgeous 2009 Szpilman Award candidates:
The runner-up, Alexander Thieme with his Embedded
… and this year’s winner, Hank Schmidt in der Beek, with In den Zillertaler Alpen
Can you spot me?
What am I, within this overwhelming sight?
Am I a humble creature? Do I not see myself?
Or is it but a false humility, a false erasing of the onlooker’s look?
–
I was told twice in the last two days that one should not make art in anyone else’s name but her own.
You want it – you have it.
Hank Schmidt In Der Beek, you have just made my day.
Other candidates can be found here. Also check out their blog.
Nadja Bournonville, A Form of Protection (2008)
What I like most are the hands.
And the neck.
It’s tense. See the two lines suavely drawing their way into the chest. And the hands, a pianist’s hands, playing out their protagonism, exploring the absent look to shine, and yet tense, they remain, maybe, it’s what they hold, and not who?
(via)
Gabriel Cornelius von Max, Monkeys as Judges of Art (1840)
(I’m the small one watching the work, the one in the middle, whose profile can be seen behind the bent knee)
Let’s start off easy.
The first image seems the most banal. But we’ll get back to it.
The second is clearly far from innocent. Or rather, it is its absolute innocence that brings the tension.
Just one more innocent painting to keep you off-guard…
And here we go:
Most of Melissa Steckbauer’s spicier pictures are somewhere along the lines of the above. They are people in erotic/sexual situations with animals, realistic or mythical ones. Now, how in the world can she include the first painting you see here (the bear-girl) in the same series, Animalia, as the ones you’ve just seen?
That is precisely what gives the series such power. They demistify us by including us in the myth. This human animal becomes a being of flesh. Of flesh and myth. This teddy bear is the same girl that’s having sex with the dog, moving away from the otherness as it penetrates her. Better: she and the beast are one flesh. They are no different, as if in peace with their unbearable similarity. Look at the man with the bear. What is this? A killing? Could it possibly be a hug? No, it is a hug, be it intended or not. It is flesh, it is warm and cuddly. And foreign. Although harmonious – Steckenbauer insists that for her the crucial issue in terms of eroticism is ethics, which she seems to oppose to a set of taboos. But is there really no taboo? No hidden, dangerous zone? To the contrary, the further she goes, the more mysterious and ambivalent the universe. What is this animal, and how does one distinguish it from oneself?
In the interview at the end of this post, Steckbauer talks about her appreciation for “meat in the painting”. And for softness and gentleness. And one of my favorite works of hers combines these two. It is somewhat different from the others, reminding me of Man Ray, maybe. What can we do, it says, what can we do if this is the touch of flesh, the touch that seems to go through my body, to immobilize us as it multiplies the members and gets us way out into oblivion, a communication made ambiguous, an identity lost, or repainted, or foresaken, for the sake of what, of what, oh don’t ask me, enjoy.
PS: I dedicate this post to the memory of my aunt, whom I first had the chance to speak to when I was 17. We spoke on the phone (she lived in another country). Her very first words to me were: “Hello young man! How are you? How is your sex life?”
(via)
From the TowersInsanity is not a want of reason.
It is reason’s overgrowth, a calculating kudzu.Explaining why, in two-ton manifesti, thinkers sally forth
with testaments and pipe bombs. Heaven help us:spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine down or
shower forth, but (for the earthling’s sake) ignore
all prayers followed by against, or for. Teach us to bearlife’s senselessness, our insignificance, and more;
let’s call that sanity. The terrifying prospect isn’t some
escapist with a novel, fond of comfort, munching sweets—it is the busy hermeneut, so serious he’s sour, intent on making
meaning of us all, and bursting from the towers to the streets.
Paintings by Hegyusz.
Up to 30000 people disappeared during the period of dictatorship in Argentina, lasting from 1976 to 1983. The desaparecidos, as they are commonly called (the dictator General Videla infamously said they were “neither alive or dead, but disappeared”), are still a very hot topic in Argentina. Following the political changes, the new democratic government introduced what they called the Ley de Punto Final, which impeded any attempts of legally pursuing the lower-level executioners of the Dirty War – thus, granting them impunity. The law of the Punto Final was voided by the Supreme Court of Argentina in 2005.
The majority of the desaparecidos still remain missing.
What made me enquire into all this was a photographic project called Ausencias (”Absences”, 2007) by Gustavo Germano.
Yes, the people who disappear from the photos are cases of the desaparecidos.
—
2006
.
—
1973
Luisa Inés Rodríguez
An interview with the artist (in Spanish) can be found at the Argentinian Museum of Memory.
Make one.
Tom Polo created the 2009 B.E.S.T. Contemporary Art Prize for Painting contest. The criteria were typical of the art contests we know. Except for one small point, which stated:
eligible entrants are artists born on the 1st February, 1985 and named as ‘Tommaso Polo’ on their birth certificates.
The exhibition of the finalists (guess who?) is taking place at the MOP gallery in Sydney.
The winning work, by – you guessed it – Tom Polo, is called Continuous One Liners (Young People Today).
Possibly many of my dear readers are thinking, we’ve had similar ideas, but they were too childish to execute. Maybe the most seductive part of tricksters is that by putting to life the silliness we only imagine (or think we imagined), they at once make it more serious and much more ridiculous.
You can find an interview with the artist at The Art Life.
Why B.E.S.T.? Because Everybody Still Tries.
