Animals and Mirrors
Souvenir de Chine by Körner Union
[via Kitsune Noir]
You are browsing the archive for December2008
Smells
A new fragrance by Anicka Yi and Maggie Peng. We missed the party, but were able to smell the perfume. The name comes from the Japanese exile Fusako Shigenobu, former founder and leader of the Japanese Red Army, who was arrested in Osaka after hiding out in Lebanon for years.
Light Balls
Field of Light by Bruce Munro consists of 6,000 acrylic tubes with optical fibers inside. “Just like flowers growing in the desert stand out so will the installation when it starts to glowing, capturing everyone’s attention.” They look like cute, light-up enoki mushrooms.
[via Fun Forever]
The Art Machine
The Plotting Machine by You Don’t Matter is a machine that is able to draw, paint, scratch or cut. Gives new meaning to art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
[via today and tomorrow]
Pretty Cool People Interviews
The Submarine Channel has produced a series of interviews with creative geniuses as diverse as Erwin Wurm and Miranda July. Titled “Pretty Cool People Interviews,” you can watch them all online with your Sunday morning coffee.
Erwin Wurm talks about hating jerks in the art world.
Humor Runs in the Family
Zadie Smith writes in the New Yorker about the role of comedy in her father’s life.
In birth, two people go into a room and three come out. In death, one person goes in and none come out. This is a cosmic joke told by Martin Amis. I like the metaphysical absurdity it draws out of the death event, the sense that death doesn’t happen at all—that it is, in fact, the opposite of a happening. There are philosophers who take this joke seriously. To their way of thinking, the only option in the face of death—in facing death’s absurd non-face—is to laugh. This is not the bold, humorless laugh of the triumphant atheist, who conquers what he calls death and his own fear of it. No: this is more unhinged. It comes from the powerless, despairing realization that death cannot be conquered, defied, contemplated, or even approached, because it’s not there; it’s only a word, signifying nothing. It’s a truly funny laugh, of the laughor-you’ll-cry variety. There is “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us!” This is a cosmic joke told by Franz Kafka, a wisecrack projected into a void. When I first put the partial cremains of my father in a Tupperware sandwich box and placed it on my writing desk, that was the joke I felt like telling.
I can do that.
The people at Flavorpill had the same assumption that we’ve all had at one time or another. Anyone can take a great photo. At least, anyone can take a photo that looks like a great photo. They chose five “iconic” photographers to emulate — Cindy Sherman, Steve McCurry, Philip Lorca Dicorcia, Richard Avedon, and Ryan McGinley — and recreated their photos using similar elements. The results are undeniably similar, but the classic retort to this sort of exercise faintly echoes. “So why didn’t you do it first?”
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978
Erin channels Cindy Sherman. Photo: Tom Starkweather
Philip Lorca DiCorcia, Mario, 1978
Oh god, now what is Tom looking for? Photo: Tom Starkweather
“You will return to earth as an animal”
Art by Brazilian Bruno Dicolla.
The International Illustrated 3rd Issue, 2007
The International Illustrated 3rd Issue, 2008