Uncategorized

…more is better. Stacked, clumped, stored and piled. Below, a dip into the ocean of those who use repetition as an aesthetic principle.

Jannis Kounellis
UNTITLED, 2006
Found wooden tables, bowl, knife, red fish
32 x 172 x 179 inches

Ann Tuominen

Chris Engman ABANDONED CRATES, 2007
Archival inkjet print
40 x 49 inches
Edition of 6, and THE AUDIENCE, 2004 Archival inkjet print 40 x 48 inches

Anissa Mack

Matt Sellars

Zelig Kurland File Room, Multnomah County Courthouse
2004 chromagenic print, edition 8

Colleen Wood, Pencils via I’m Revolting

Ed Wicklander He loves his kitties and has the carvings to prove it.

Kate Ericson / Mel Ziegler
Statue of Liberty, 1988
Etched glass jars and paint on metal shelves
72″ x 5″ x 5″

Jonathan Seliger Stretched Snowman, 2007
Automotive enamel on aluminum
99″ x 28″ x 26″

Hart Boyd

(For more of similar, see Things Organized Neatly.)

Will Rogan

The Cartoonists Network is in favor of freedom of expression. I would have thought that went without saying, but considering the many death threats leveled at cartoonists around the globe, they must have felt the redundancy necessary. Petition here, signed by screens full of scribblers, sent by email from Seattle’s Molly Norris. She is one of the cartoonists the Network defends. If Norris were any sweeter, she’d cause cavities. Threatening her life throws into high relief the insanity of radical Islam. Typical Norris cartoon below:

From Davis‘ As America Falls series.

I watch So You Think You Can Dance for the dancers and a few of
its choreographers, including Travis Wall, Napoleon and Tabitha D’umo
(Nappy Taps), Shane Sparks, Mandy Moore, Sonya Tayeh and Tyce
DiOrio for his contemporary, not Broadway. His Broadway is dead move on
dead move. Week after week, however, dancers push past whatever
grindingly obvious theme the choreographers hand them to create a
genuine moment or two. However bad the choreography, dancers manage to
redeem it. When the right choreographer meets the right dancer, which
happens at least once an episode, the result is thrilling.

Dance
critics tend to dislike the show, for good reason. (Watch Travis Wall’s
fake audition in which he crams every slam-bam cliche for which the show
is know into a 3-minute, cross-dressing routine that manages while extremely corny, to be great. Choreographer dim, dancer killer.)

But the real problem is the judges.

With
her vehement and irrational distaste for first Brandon Bryant and this
season’s Adechike Torbert, Mia Michaels appears to be unable to bear the sight of heavily muscled black men. (Slender black men are, in her book, OK.) Two geysers of crazy aren’t enough evidence of conscious racism, but
unconscious? Hell yes, especially because Michaels comes from the
unedited id school of criticism. Whatever she’s feeling, she says. In
the end, unconscious is more insidious. When sleep walkers commit a
crime, they wake up indignant at the charge.

In the dance context, however, nothing out of Michaels’ mouth comes close to the stupidity of Nigel Lythgoe’s comment last week. Addressing a dancer, he said:

You are not the artist at the end of the day. The choreographer is. You are the artist’s brush if you like….

Following
that reasoning, actors aren’t artists either. Nor are singers, unless
they wrote the song. What about musicians? (Yes to Mendelssohn, no to
Isaak Perlman?) I can’t remember reading or hearing anything as
wrong-headed about an art form. Is he what we have to put up with to
see dance on TV? Can Michaels employ a personal diversity trainer to address the root of her
problem or will she go on and on, making life hell for the type of male
black dancer she fears and/or hates?

Yoan Capote

detail:

How many people responsible for the more than 31 million hits in seven weeks to a Katy Perry video realize that its chief asset comes from Will Cotton? Those who know he provided the visuals knew it already or dug for it. His name isn’t on the link.

Cotton

Shot from the video:

Naturally, teen sites are panting, but we can expect more from art writers, right?

Here’s Emma Allen on Artinfo:

When someone calls to tell you that candy-sweet pop star Katy Perry is in pastry-loving painter Will Cotton’s 
studio, and will talk to you about the nude portrait she commissioned
from him for the cover of her latest album (“Teenage Dream”), but only
if you get in a cab immediately, and then run through the streets of the
Lower East Side — well, you do it.

A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. Doubtless Perry’s Cotton-fueled sensation has sent legions of pop music art directors into art galleries to find another hit maker. I hope they follow Perry’s excellent example and pay the artist. Giving the artist credit on the product would also be laudable.

One: Think of where you want to go.
John Grade

Two: Take your time.
Adam Ekberg

Three: Use your arms.
Roger Ballen

Can you stop time? Only if you’re a magazine long sealed into its own irrelevance. Even there, however, securely out of date, Time can occasionally leak into the present moment. I refer to its cover photo of a young woman whose nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban for the crime of escaping back to her family. To call the Taliban a medieval madness is to insult the Dark Ages. (Where are the Taliban’s cathedrals, tapestries, songs, poems and illuminated manuscripts?) What’s shared is a mobilizing energy. As the Catholics liked to say, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”  Against that energy, our blundering intrusions are unlikely to accomplish anything of lasting value. The negatives are plain to anyone, and they are spreading, like the seeds of the Church.

Joel Ross

Damaged, brutal, in the wrong against a deeper wrong, we go on, not on their side and not on our own. Given the intractable hatred of their countrymen, what can Afghan women expect from us?

Joel Ross

Source of title: Love and hate warring together

Karen Ryan

Charles Krafft