Shelf art

Just one bit of wall in my place. It evolved into an art space/knick knack shelf and I really like it.

Represented, among other things: a kitschy plastic unicorn my friend J got me from Wisconsin Dells; black and white mini plush labbits; a windup penguin I've had since I was a baby; covers of cool old mystery paperbacks; printout from an Art News magazine of a Ray Johnson show (possibly my favorite artist of all time); glow in the dark dinosaurs because those are two of the greatest things in the world (glowing things and dinosaurs!). Oh and the thing in front of the rainbow unikitty is my fake crow (it has real feathers but is not an actual dead crow) called Craw.

Nicola Tyson

An artist I'm obsessed with right now: Nicola Tyson. I fell in love with one picture in February's Art in America and off I went. I'm especially into her pencil drawings; something about the textures and both delicate and hard lines, plus the amazing abstract/anthropomorphic shapes is just fascinating!

    

An artist's favorite car designs

I'm not a gearhead by any means - I barely understand how a combustion engine works, or the difference between corporation, make, and model. But recently got interested in pinning down my favorites. So this is an artist's take on cars - the pure aesthetics of car design throughout the years (a lot of my favorites are the classic 60s and 70s models)

I meant to write more, but I found this draft and decided it was worth posting as is. As you can see, a lot of them are favorites from movies, which is the primary way I end up seeing neat car designs, and and others are just favorites from my random browsing of car designs throughout history. I think it's interesting how car designs come to have a certain "personality," and say something about their drivers - which is on reason they're great for the movies, not only to play out the gearhead fantasy, but to build a character: you get a surprising amount of impression about a character, baddie or good guy, from their "signature" car alone.

Fluxus ... or wreck this everything

☞ Fluxus Digital Collection @ UI

Taking shape around 1959, the international cohort of artists known as Fluxus experimented with —or better yet between—poetry, theater, music, and the visual arts. More than a list of artists, a historical moment, or a set of artifacts, Fluxus gives name to a network of social relationships and common approaches to art-making that highlights, among other things, playfulness, simplicity, internationalism, intermedia, ephemerality, and the unity of art and everyday life.

One finds in Fluxus work genre-blurring “intermedia,” provocative performance events, and mobile art “kits.” One finds an international syndicate of collaborating, agitating, pranksterish artmakers. The American Dick Higgins notes, “[t]his depended upon a fluid conception of group identity: anyone who wanted to do that kind of thing was Fluxus … [we] stuck together to do Fluxus kinds of things, even when [we] were also doing other kinds of things at the same time.” Fluxus members worked in areas across and between multiple forms, challenging distinctions between artistic genres, and between art and everyday life. Perhaps it’s best to think of Fluxus as a provisional space wherein an undetermined number of artists, writers, and musicians with shared approaches to art did things together.

brilliant bones

Checked this out of the library last week

"In 1578 word spread of the discovery in Rome of a network of underground tombs containing the remains of thousands of early Christian martyrs. Many skeletons of these supposed saints were soon removed from their resting place and sent to Catholic churches in Europe to replace holy relics that were destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. Once in place the skeletons were then carefully reassembled and enshrined in costumes, wigs, jewels, crowns, gold lace, and armor as a physical reminder of the heavenly treasures that awaited in the afterlife.

Over the past few years photographer Paul Koudounaris who specializes in the photography of skeletal reliquaries, mummies and other aspects of death, managed to gain unprecedented access to various religious institutions to photograph many of these beautifully macabre shrines for the first time in history." (text via)

Am now completely obsessed with bones covered in jewels and gold. One of the peculiarities of the middle ages is now really inspiring gothic (in the sense of morbid) roccoco art phenomenon.