Yet again, Maurizio Cattelan achieved his admitted goal: he is on the covers of magazines.
The finger, called L.O.V.E.*, has been erected in front of the Milan stock exchange for the duration of the Fashion Week happening in the city.
Everyone is happy: Cattelan gets his attention, the public is proud of such a daring representative, the city gets its Fashion Week (kind of) publicized, and the brokers… well, the brokers have a good laugh and continue their business as usual.
That is not to say the work is not good. It is poignant. The finger that is sticking is the only one remaining on the hand. The others seem to have been severed. So is this hand telling the bankers to go fuck themselves, or is that the only thing it can say? Or maybe it’s that when you have next to nothing, the middle finger is the one to resist longest.
Oh, but of course, it’s made of marble and put on a pedestal.

But that, really, is not the work at work here. The work is to have been able to put it in front of the Stock Exchange. To have shown them the finger and have them accept it. This is what makes a real contemporary trickster – not the sculpture, but the context.
“We want to be confirmed as the capital of contemporary art”, the city’s administrators officially stated, “and we have to not only mediate but also accept what we do not like”.
Which is a hilarious comment, and only confirms Cattelan’s intelligence. One wonders how he did it. Maybe what he said was, let’s cut the crap, it is a criticism, but it will attract more tourists than you can ever imagine, and will not hurt you in any way whatsoever, because no one is going to take their money out of the stocks after seeing my work. On the contrary, the tourists will leave their money in Milan.
But the controversy remains. “It is unacceptable that the City sticks its finger up to the Stock Exchange” – said the councillor for Town Planning Carlo Masseroli in a fervent discussion.
Masseroli says: “the administration cannot be culturally subordinate to a self-styled artist like Cattelan who wants to use Milan to earn money”.
Oh, that’s right, Cattelan made money off this! I wonder who payed him.
So the question is, who is Cattelan showing the finger to?
I’m not sure, but the pictures suggest that the finger is in front of the stock exchange. And is not pointing towards it, but from it.

Which could end this text. But will not. Because even if Cattelan laughs in our face, even if he plays a trick on all of us, he still plays out the crucial role of catalyzer – he materializes the tensions that are already there. He makes us go “Hey! Wait a minute!” He sticks the finger where it hurts.

*The title was originally supposed to be “Omnia munda mundis” (“To the pure ones everything is pure”).

Take a look at the pictures by Roger Cremers. The series, which won an award at the 2009 World Press Photo, is called Preserving Memory: Visitors at the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, 30 April-4 May.



No, I will not be writing about how the ever-present cameras turn us into monsters. Or about consumerism versus culture.
What interests me here, to start with, is how we position ourselves in relation to the past.
What is given to us is not merely a luggage – a heritage that is like an object. It is an ever-eroding landscape. And each person has her own map she may or may not use to rebuild it, or rather, to build herself into it.
Watch these bodies. These figures. Watch how they open a dialogue they are not aware of. Watch how they become, that’s it, a sign.
Maybe the most dramatic is the last one, the young man lying on the ground, his hands close to his face. Forget his camera. Now, what do you see?
Or maybe the most dramatic is the first, black figure, that is watching birds through binoculars, or a plane, or he could almost be shouting a friendly greeting to someone standing on the roof… were it not the seemingly anonymous bricks behind him. Were it not our maps. And now, with your map, what do you see? Who is hitting him? Shooting?
Or rather, what is he, what are they protecting themselves against?

What makes a sign a sign?
When does it signify, lead to the signified? How does the arrow gain its shape? How is it born?
How much of these vectors is rooted in us so deeply, we spell it out with every word, unknowingly?

Take this much less spectacular project by William Boling, called Never Gone. Boling took photographs of the places in Atlanta where the Battle of Atlanta occurred in July 1864.

So what makes a sign a sign?
When does it signify, lead to the signified? How does the arrow gain its shape? How is it born?
How much of these vectors is rooted in us so deeply, we spell it out with every word, unknowingly?

Take a look at the pictures by Roger Cremers. The series, which won an award at the 2009 World Press Photo, is called Preserving Memory: Visitors at the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, 30 April-4 May.



No, I will not be writing about how the ever-present cameras turn us into monsters. Or about consumerism versus culture.
What interests me here, to start with, is how we position ourselves in relation to the past.
What is given to us is not merely a luggage – a heritage that is like an object. It is an ever-eroding landscape. And each person has her own map she may or may not use to rebuild it, or rather, to build herself into it.
Watch these bodies. These figures. Watch how they open a dialogue they are not aware of. Watch how they become, that’s it, a sign.
Maybe the most dramatic is the last one, the young man lying on the ground, his hands close to his face. Forget his camera. Now, what do you see?
Or maybe the most dramatic is the first, black figure, that is watching birds through binoculars, or a plane, or he could almost be shouting a friendly greeting to someone standing on the roof… were it not the seemingly anonymous bricks behind him. Were it not our maps. And now, with your map, what do you see? Who is hitting him? Shooting?
Or rather, what is he, what are they protecting themselves against?

What makes a sign a sign?
When does it signify, lead to the signified? How does the arrow gain its shape? How is it born?
How much of these vectors is rooted in us so deeply, we spell it out with every word, unknowingly?

Take this much less spectacular project by William Boling, called Never Gone. Boling took photographs of the places in Atlanta where the Battle of Atlanta occurred in July 1864.

So what makes a sign a sign?
When does it signify, lead to the signified? How does the arrow gain its shape? How is it born?
How much of these vectors is rooted in us so deeply, we spell it out with every word, unknowingly?

These color photographs were all taken in the Russian Empire between 1909 and 1918.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii was a Russian photographer born in 1863. After studying chemistry with Mendeleev and later with Adolf Miethe – one of the crucial figures in the invention of color photography – Gorskii started developing his own techniques and processes of color photography, giving it a quality that even impresses even today.
In 1909, he convinced the tsar Nicolas II to send him on a trip across the Russian Empire, to document its impressive diversity. It was a 10-year project, during which Gorskii took over 10 000 pictures, and it ended up outlasting the tsar himself, and the Empire for that matter, as the October Revolution swept away the monarchy. In 1918, he emigrated to Paris, where he died in 1944.

The image archive of 1902 negatives which were left was bought by the Library of Congress a few years after the artist’s death, and was put online in 2004. You can find it here.

Prokuda-Gorskii’s most famous photo is of Leo Tolstoy, dated 1908.

But I prefer this monumental, megalomaniac and modest project of documenting Imperial Russia, which at the time was larger than the USSR ever came to be. The diversity of the people, and the shockingly modern colors of their portraits, make them impossible to forget. They are our contemporaries, now that they stopped hiding between the unfocused black-and-whiteness.
They are almost too present.

Austrian (probably meaning also Polish and of other origins) prisoners somewhere in Russia. It’s really worth seeing a high-resolution image.

Here he is, Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. In a landscape that is (eerily?) ours.
PS. The amazing color bars that appear on some of the pictures are the result of Prokudin-Gorskii’s ingenious process, which consisted in taking three subsequent, monochromatic photographs, one with a green filter, one with blue and one with red. He then superimposed the three projections using lamps with a corresponding filter system. I adore these frames, unfortunately some of the images needed additional computer editing (by the Library of Congress) and in this version were cropped.
You can find an extended biography of Gorskii here.

Painters working on the streets of Montmartre in Paris may soon become a thing of the past with the introduction of cheap, soulless Chinese paintings done by the painters equivalent of a battery hen in a small steal cage.

Many of the 300 officially registered artists working on the streets are now competing with souvenir shops selling mass produced Chinese oil paintings for a fraction of the cost that local Paris artists can afford to sell them for.

David Chazan wrote some more on this topic at the BBC here.. “When I visit some of the souvenir shops and question the owners about the origin of their pictures, at first they deny that they are imported. But after a few minutes, some admit that they do buy imported pictures or prints – and even touch them up themselves.” Continue Reading..

My first opinion would usually be to let the fittest survive, but not in this case. Mass produced Chinese oil paintings are anti-art and any artist or art lover that supports them should hang their head in shame. Go buy an art poster if you must, but don’t encourage the abuse of featherless battery hens that pop out countless empty blobs of colored mud parading as art.

If the uncreative junk that they turn out day after day isn’t enough to change your mind, think of the working contemporary artists around the world that constantly have their images stolen by battery artists in China. Van Gogh may not mind having his sunflowers ripped off and reproduced thousands of times each year, but emerging and mid-career artists probably Do mind.

On a somewhat related note, this week I have tried to buy some shorts and shirts without a “Made in China” label on it and have been unsuccessful. I will keep trying, but at some point I have to buy clothes, which will mean that I will have to submit to buying products from the world’s mega-factory (a factory that is hungry for coal fired power plants and has little time for silly things like an ecosystem).

End rant on China here.

Phew, sorry you had to hear that.

I know it looks politically biased and almost sexist to be posting two pictures of Sarah Palin nude, but nobody seems to have painted Joe Biden nude, so I haven’t posted his pictures.

The first painter to depict the oil loving, polar bear hating VP nominee naked was the Chicago painter Bruce Elliott. The nude Sarah Palin painting below is done by the penis wielding Australian based artist Tim Patch, better known as Pricasso because of the tool he uses to paint with. It shows the American vice president hopeful completely naked, squatting on the head of a moose, with a gun between her legs.

Pricasso (Tim Patch) also did this painting below of Barack Obama and John McCain with his Penis.

For an idea of how Pricasso uses his tool of trade, see him painting the Obama/McCain painting in the video below..

Pricasso will be appearing at Perry Mann’s Exotic Erotic Ball and Expo at Treasure Island, San Francisco, USA on the 24th and 25th of October, 2008. For more penile art by Pricasso or Tim Patch see his website here.
>> Nude News, Political News, Funny News, Sarah Palin Naked

Age is violence. It is violence as in: power, and it is violence as the inevitable overpowering.
The women on the pictures from the Perishables series (2004) by Pinar Yolacan wear this age in a way that brings about strong feelings. Disgust? Humiliation? But why? Why is wearing meat so shocking? We do get it – the meat is just a continuation of what we are, it is as sacred or as profane as we wish to see it. So why does it seem so intensly profane? Why is it revolting?
The women on the pictures don’t seem embarrassed. To the contrary – they know who they are. And they know how deep is skin-deep. And possibly because of their incredibly stoic stance, we reach another point – of acceptance, of peace.

There is a wisdom in these wrinkles that seems unbearably right. And beyond the purity of light, may I add – there is also pain.

The exceptional thing is – this pain is distinguished. And if you think it’s because the subjects were WASPs, see Pinar Yolacan’s the Maria series (2007).

Here are women from the Bahia region in Brasil, which was colonized by the Portuguese. And here, the flesh changes its value: it is not about age any more, but rather, about distinction and pride, but also submission and humiliation, about the color of skin and the heaviness of the-object-that-thinks. Maria is the most common Portuguese name – and in Brasil nearly every woman has Maria as one of her names. It is also a reference to the Virgin Mary, a reference that here challenges our thinking about holiness. Look at this raw, dark flesh, and see the purity.

It seems to me Yolacan does not really have a statement that guides her work (interview with the artist here). Vanitas. Possibly. But I’d rather see her as a researcher – she investigates what the matter – the flesh – can tell her, where it can lead her. And this very intuitive, “non-rational” way of working is something I cherish. Because if you listen carefuly, your own sensitivity will embrace the matter in such a way that, once it is done, the work might speak the thousand words you never knew you had.

I was writing about 3 weeks spent of a friends boat on lake Erie recreating watercolors lost in Argentina. A day or two after we got Alan’s boat in the water I helped Markus get his new/old 40 foot + wooden sailboat over to his slip with no mishaps. A few days later he called me back and said he and a friend were going to take it out for a little shake down cruise. It was a fairly blustery day, sunny with 3 -4 foot swells. I hadn’t actually made any watercolors yet and wanted to get started but decided I wanted to go with Markus on his new boat instead. It’s a beauty for sure. Newly restored after an Ohio winter’s worth of work in the back yard scraping, sanding and painting the hull and redoing much of the interior. I was supposed to help with some of the hand work but could never get free when Markus was able to work. So Markus did it all. I’m always impressed at his industrious nature, his knowledge and creative resolve. He did nearly all the work himself from bending wood to repair the hull breaches, painting and re-stitching sails. He’s an ace at maintaining a motor and has refit his diesel to burn 30 percent bio-fuel. Remarkable! Normally I’d simply call this green thinking but in this market any saving is appreciated with the price of diesel often above $4.50 a gallon.

We had a little trouble with the boat turning into the wind with only the mainsail up once we left the marina causing the sails to lose wind or luff. Markus jury rigged his working jib. It wasn’t quite the proper rigging. There was an unnatural scalloping along the luff or front line of the sail as it attached to the bow sprit up to the line that kept it to the main mast. Markus said he didn’t have the right fixtures attached so he made it up as he went along. Out of Irons refers to the tri-point or ‘Y’ shaped wind direction device on top of the main mast. A sail boat cannot sail less than 45 degrees against the wind or into the wind. When the directional is between the rear two metal points one is ‘In Irons’. Creative sailing…I love it. And it did the trick of keeping the boat out of irons even if it lead to a rather rough sail. At time we were nearly healed over at about 30 degrees which means the rails or gunnels are nearly in the water. That can be rather exciting on such a large boat. We also had a little trouble keeping the inflatable dinghy from cupping water behind the boat. The rigging tying it to the rear davits was a bit loose so it hung too low to the surface of the water. We eventually tried tying it up tighter but even that failed us a little while later. But it was such a windy day and there was a slow leak that had Markus flustered. We brought her back in after a rather exciting 3 hour sail.

I managed to get my first watercolor started the next day. It was a reworking of the first watercolor I did in Cordoba in 2004 from my hotel window. Originally done in a book of rice paper, the papers in the new book gave a much more vibrant range of color. Rag paper does that, while rice paper tends to absorb the chromatic intensity. I’ve included images of both the original and the new version.

Interestingly I realized almost right away that while I had photos of a number of the works done in 2004 and some of the earlier works done in Buenos Aires in 2001 and 2003 I couldn’t just copy them. Maybe its me. But a work, even if it is only a preparatory sketch is also a complete idea in and of itself. There is no copying stroke for stroke. There must always be a new bit of creative response in any work whether directly from life, from imagination or from a preliminary study. In the case of these re done images I began to take a lot of liberties with the color, shaping and broshwork even when there was at the same time a certain loyalty to the original image. While I tend to like both versions of each image I must say that the reprised images have a very different energy to them.

I also quickly realized that to mentally get into each image I almost had to do the same process as I had originally done on location. I often did a small postcard sized image from life, returned to the hotel and then did a larger version from the study and memory and sometimes an even larger variation. I began doing the same thing while working on my friends boat. I’d start a small study, then rework it again at a slightly larger size and finally, if all went well a larger version in the bigger book I’d purchased for the project. Each variation had its own qualities…none were exactly alike, none were ultimately better just different in my mind with perhaps a couple of exceptions. But the process began to unlock certain visual memories that carried me much further than simply copying a photograph would have.

Ultimately I did so many variations on the Sierra Chicas that I felt I could do them blindfolded in my sleep backwards…to the point that I almost sense that this is the ultimate Argentina in my mind. But in the case of the Del Dique (the dike or the dam) works, I had only a color photograph and a pen and ink sketch to work with. The photo wasn’t very large format so much detail was gone. I had to work primarily from memory and what the image gave me to spin off from.

In a week or two I will return to Alan’s boat to continue my journey into the memory of my Argentina. Now I have a better sense of how to work…a more efficient process to access my memories and create a body of work in the shortest amount of time. I have approximately 50 more works to recreate. I hope to get perhaps two thirds of that number accomplished this time if I work with some discipline for about 5 or 6 hours everyday. I think I can create about 4 or 5 images or variations on images every day given that I can work every day. Weekends will be hard as Alan brings friends to the boat. I’ll have to pack things away from Friday night to Sunday evening each week. So I have about 10 days to do 25 – 30 works. It took me 15 days to do 27 works the last time. And that included several days during the middle of the week when Markus came up to sail. I know this sounds like quantity vs. quality. But it is not unlike when I worked as a commercial illustrator. I had to punch a time clock for each project I worked on any given day so my boss could bill for creative time. I became very disciplined during those years. I don’t often practice those disciplines as a fine artist. But in this case it seems to be the right approach. After all I’d already done these works once before. They are now in my head. In that sense they become somewhat like the works I do from imagination in my studio. While the inventive works are also in my head as an idea when I begin them and begin to verge toward and merge with extrapolations as I go these have begun to do the same thing even though they began as simple works from life. It’ll be nice to finally release them and the entire experience which caused me to have to recreate them.

Markus, another of his sailing friends and I went out once more for a second shakedown cruise before I finally came home. We sailed half way to Kelly’s Island. He’d rigged a larger jib with the proper fixtures so it was a much smoother sail. But the leak was still bothering him although the bilge pump seemed to drain it quite nicely. A day later he finally got the leak sealed, at least for the season amd shortly after that I drove back to Columbus. I must admit it was hard to come home to mowing the yard, and the mundane everyday things one does to get by. The solidtude of being on the boat by myself most of the week was itself theraputic. But as I said in another week or two I’ll be back up on the boat painting away. And maybe I’ll manage to get up there a few more times before the summer turns to fall and then time to take the boats out of the water for the winter… at least for a couple of weekend cruises.

Created by Walter King On 07/24/08 At 10:37 AM