Vanessa Beecroft

I decided to have a look at Vanessa Beecroft because of her use of the female body in performances. I find her weird and bitchy, in her performance VB51 in 2002 she told the participants that there would be three acts, each signaled by a bell, the first in which they stood still, the second they could move around and the third they could do as they pleased.
No bell rang and the thirty participants waited and waited, some having to be carried out at the end. Cruel.
Interesting how i some works she makes the models look androgenous and shaves their pubes. I don't really get it, the weird relationship between viewer and participant. All in the same room, some object some subject, all real people but they live out the roles expected of them.
Crazy crazy bitch.
The above picture is my favourite work of hers, because it looks like hair over the model's faces. The masks are translucent (i hate that word its stupid), you can sort of see through them but not, its like one of those spider nests with the ball of white sticky web you almost would expect to see spiders spilling out if you sliced a hole through the side.

More photos

I added more green, cyan and changed the levels on this pic to make it more toxic mouldy looking. I liked the green tones in the first photos i took that were made by the bright green shower curtain so I've tried to keep those. My photography skills leave a lot to be desired but who cares it's digital and photoshop is too easy. :P

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.


This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
Water poured from my snoopy toothbrush holder i got in japan in 2003 onto a $15 mirror i bought when i got lost coming home from the airport for an hour and a half in hillsborough or somewhere... This all happened on a desk that i bought for $1 on trademe, the water went eerywhere and almost into the camera and laptop (almost as in a little bit did but not enough to warrant telling anyone). When i add that text to a photograph it makes you wonder why i used these objects whereas if it's just thephoto it doesn't matter in the slightest. I like how photographs can omit information like that. Sometimes it's not always a good thing. Like in these pictures you don't know who's hair it is... I need to work on that if I'm going to use more photography in my work.
This looks like glitter or broken glass. Very pretty.
i like the focus on the hair and not the face. thats all...

crit II

After today i think I need to focus on presentation to fully resolve my works. Some feedback i got was positive about the video works, but that the one with me cleansing my face was more interesting than the one with me putting on makeup. hmmm. I think i will start again with reactions to that first video, i never really thought about the implications and meanings this gave to the work that I didn't really want.

This video feels very voyeuristic, letting the viewer in on a private moment, revealing through washing the face a routine mundane activity that is very carefully considered by the subject.

[INSERT VIDEO HTML HERE]

SO- more video works tonight, and now that timothus jackapuss is free he can be my camera man for some sort of performative experimentation yusss. :) film video pieces tonight and edit tomorrow. In the meantime collect more drawings for the other other blog, #11.

An idea i had was to get a big mirror and a piece of glass. Display the hairball on top of the glass on top of the mirror (or hovering above it) so that you can see underneath it. Playing with reflections and that vibrating mirror is something i need to get on to as well. so much work to dooooooo.dle.

Framing

One idea i had was to frame the little photographs i took. I really like the photos but just can't seem to find a suitable way of presenting them. I think trying them on a larger scale will be better in the way that it will make them more impressive??? i like the small hairy picture inside the red frame. I don't think anyone really got it in the critique or noticed it so obviously its not something to carry on with.
Below, just an idea for displaying them. This photo gives you pretty much no information and yeah. I think i'll leave these pictures and concentrate on other things :)

when to say when

This picture disturbs me and makes me sad. I don't think people have a right to take pictures like these, it is so voyeuristic. There is some great discussion about this kind of thing except under different circumstances on Richard Renaldi's Photography Blog.

"Photographers take pictures of an injured man during clashes believed to be linked to recent anti-foreigner violence in Reiger Park informal settlement in South Africa on May 20, 2008."

pizza. mmm.

Three works of art by moonday... Here's the tune,

1. I video myself putting on makeup and whatever i do to get ready which can't take longer than 12 minutes or my camera will die. I then play this back and record myself looking at myself, Gazing at myself that was gazing at myself in a mirror. what...

2. Place the beautiful hairball on a table with lots of other nice feminine things, jewellery, makeup, scarves, womanly goodness and crap.

3. Penis pictures

4. Frame the small photographs of me and my hairbally

5. Film something in the bathroom then project it, hair in the sink, my hair in the bath, something short because of the lack of camera until i do the course at school to be able to use it. for fucks sake.

Just a slight alteration

creative commons licence

Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand

Wim Delvoye

Wim Delvoye has been tattooing pigs since the 1990s. In recent years it seems that more artists are killing animals in the name of art. What are your thoughts on this project? Should a line be drawn between branding animals for slaughter and consumption and tattooing and slaughtering animals in the name of art? What say you?

i copy and pasted that sentence. In the name of art??? what a strange phrase.

Bringing Home the Bacon: Wim Delvoye ArtAsiaPacific, pp. 154-159 30 September 2007

Interview with Delvoye and Paul Laster
SPERONE WESTWATER

WIM DELVOYE: I started in 1992, did one or two pigs in 1994 and in 1995 I tattooed 15, but they were dead pigs; I got the skins from slaughterhouses. I started to tattoo live pigs in 1997. I was interested in the idea of the pig as a bank – a piggy bank. I didn’t have the concept formulated yet, but I decided to place some small drawings onto these living organisms and let them grow. From the beginning, there was the idea that the pig would literally grow in value, but I also knew that they were considered pretty worthless. It’s hard to make something as prestigious as art from a pig. It’s not kosher."

"In the early works, the imagery was as banal and trivial as possible: skulls, hearts, crosses. It was an encyclopedia of trivial things. I wasn’t really interested in the pig’s anatomy. But once I started tattooing live pigs, I was forced to take an interest in their anatomy, and that affected the composition. I gained new respect for the animals and began making tattoos for them. For example, the tattoo would follow the butt and shoulders and, as the pig grew, it became paler while the lines became thicker."

"There are two schools of thought about how the pigs should be exhibited. Some people like the flat skins hanging on the wall because you still see bits of the head and legs. Others prefer the hairy skins stretched like a canvas. If I have a complete skin with hooves and ears intact, and I like the tattoo, then I stuff it. It becomes more sculptural that way. I used to have the stuffed pigs standing, but now I prefer them sitting, like a stone lion outside a Chinese restaurant." ‘Because they grow fast and they are so much better to tattoo than fish.’

Controversy!
The artist is killing animals for art. Well, other people kill them for food and that is unnecessary too. I think this work is very powerful and full of arguments, reasons, meanings and so it seems contradictions. I think Delvoye has taken it as a fact of life that these pigs would have died anyway so is treating them as a commodity but for novelty value rather than nourishment. These pigs would have lead a much better life than those we buy as bacon in the supermarket. They even get coal in winter when they're cold (bad!) Personally I wouldn't kill animals for the sake of art but criticism from people that eat meat is meaningless to me. love the tattoos of disney, Louis Vuitton and other 'iconic' things. Delvoye is a vegetarian.

"Some designs I try for the first time on people and, if they work, I will surely re-create the tattoo on a pig."

SO many people have the courage to say that this is cruelty online (as always). Calling tattoos mutilation! And saying it isn't art. haha. People are so quick to condemn him for allowing these animals to be slaughtered for their skin. Fucking morons. Even after they are dead these pigs are revered and on display, thats kind of sick but i think it's better than just being made into a ball or a piece of furniture. It is the people that purchase the pigs that decide to kill them, and the artist says that none of them keep the animal as a pet. Some let the pig die of old age, emphasis on the word let. I don't think that "it's better than" or a least he's not...: are justification for tattooing the pigs. I'm confused. You can never really do the animal's justice. Keeping them as a pet, releasing them into the wild, theres a form of cruelty involved in everything and it can't be avoided unless you were to go back hundreds of years and never eat the pigs in the first place. fuuuck i dont know. This work is powerful and i like it I'll leave it at that.

Tattooing, skin, life, permanence, animals, commodity; Delvoye's work contains many ideas that interest me and that i want to have within my own work. I've decided now that i don't really want to deal specifically with the animal issues and make it more about the female body and perceptions around that. I will still draw comparisons between humans and animals but will not let this take over my work. I think my work will be much stronger than last year with the added elements of feminism and the abject.

Delvoye's work Cloaca is shitty i love it, commodifying poos, not even real poos. thats the interesting part. He sells cloaca paraphenalia including tshirts and key chains. His shit is highly sought after.

ARTSPACE

Went to artspace last thursday and met up with Robyn the new curatorial intern about doing some volunteer work. Alicia Frankovich is having a show there in May so i thought I would have a wee lookie lookie at her work. I can't find a lot online but from what I've seen it reminds me of an exhibition i hated at the dpag by Simon Denny. I didn't understand it at all. I'm not going to try and like it either.
Aside from that Robyn had some really interesting things to say about Frankovich's performative works, one in which she was suspended from the roof and swinging into desks that were all stacked up like a house of cards. Frankovich documents her performances which is something I am having an issue with, but she does interesting things with the documentation eg; slowing down video footage when it is played back, bringing new perceptions of time in to play. Playing with sound, removing and adding, manipulating. So many new possibilities :) smiles :)

alterations explorations in images and composition

powder puff. This nicely formed little ball looks a lot less menacing than the unruly mass of tangled hair it began as. It's more inviting to touch because it seems to have a shape and hence is made with purpose/intent and is not discarded body waste.
green. The fingers are posed weirdly, like waiting for something rather than grasping at the edge of the bath.
hair could probably do with a wash/cut/dye but i can't be flucked
oooh a vignette. I love the reflection you can see in the metal of the bathroom sink. There is a lot i think that can be explored in this room with the mirrors and other shiny surfaces. Very feminist and abject, not so much the political activist path I was heading towards.
blurry what could this be?? I like the warmth and familiarity of this photo. I blurred it more because I didn't want it to be too identifiable.
dead skin, decay, death, waste. These tones convey that feeling and transform the body into something unearthly. Churr photoshop i heart you.

Consuming meat and women. nomnom nom.

I had a dream last night that I was getting strips of skin cut off me, thin lines that spiralled around my arms and wrists. Then i realised that i had lost the strips and was hunting through a paper waste basket for them, not believing that someone could have just thrown them away. I had to find them before they dried out and went scabby and yellow but I just couldn't seem to find them.

'People with power have always eaten meat'-Carol Adams

I read an article in Feminism- Art theory an Anthology by Hilary Robinson. It discussed a work by Jana Sterbak called Flesh Dress for an albino (1991) which was a dress made out of strips of beef. It drew comparisons between women and animals, it also drew a shitload of criticism. The most negative feedback centered around wastage of food which is hypocritical. I won't go in to cmparing how much more resources meat production uses compared with vegetables it just falls on deaf ears.
Did you slay that chick last night?
Whips, chains, leather restraints, tethers yesss?

Women sympathise with animals, relate to or are related to animals; playboy bunny, sex kitten *vomits* It is degrading for both parties being objectified and used in such a way.Sarah Lucas. Bunny 1997

Women engage in self deprivation, offering the men the best food in the house which is most often the hard earned luxury of eating meat. Well in my household this is the case, my mother always gives dad the best and largest quantity of meat often missing out on it herself. Men are viewed as weaker if they are vegetarian, not that it takes any strength or skill to buy a packet of bacon, its incredibly masculine to eat it.

Kiki Smith has a cool name

Messy, uncomfortable, open, personal, desires, bodily fluids, anxiety, body as landscape, architecture, taboo. BOO!

Kiki uses low art or craft mediums generally associated with women such as beading, embroidery, paper and glass. She combines these with formal materials associated with high art, MEN"": bronze and plaster. Combining these she effaces the purity of the high art materials. Totally copied that last sentence from a book :)
Her work responds to that of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Krueger, it is very feminist and deals with abjection in art. I love the photocopy/ print she has done of her face all flayed out as if the skin has been peeled from her head. It reminds me of an animal skin used as a floor mat or something, an object that people walk over carelessly. Leather chairs are like this for me, an animal skin encompassing foamy comfort. such a waste of animal using it for a stupid chair, luxurios masculine cold leather chair. Cracking and drying out like real skin does.
COMFORT?

Meat Arms 1992
Kiki uses animal flesh to create human arms then casts them in bronze. The result is a realistic looking arm with the skin peeled off revealing muscle tissue, MEAT. She has taken a universally repulsive subject and made it precious and beautiful by casting it in bronze. But at the same time she hasn't. Being bronze it is more valuable, it isn't human, its animal made to look like human, imitation.. does this make it more/less acceptable? She couldn't have used a real human arm to craft it of course, and animals are going to die anyway so meat is in ready supply. eeew kiki you sicko.

Train 1994
Wax figure with red beads trailing out of its vajayjay. Looks awesome! Hello sparkling bloody menstruation. Definitely a female figure, looks almost as if it is dragging chains, sort of painful, struggling??

illicit ticilli

Yesterday on the way to visit the tattoo place i walked past a bar, there was a man outside slumped over a table, he looked like he has passed out. The table had slats on top so there were gaps for his yellow vomit to pass through and land at his feet on the foot path. Lucky for him.
I didn't stop to help him, I even briefly thought about what it would look like as a photo how sick.
I went to illicit tattoos just because I knew it was there, the guy called Nic that does the piercing talked to me and was sort of like whaaat whyyyy. He said that skin shrinks a lot when you take it off so a lot more would have to come off, i expected that. He also said it is an awkward place to take skin from and that it wold hurt. I kind of figured that too. I think my penis toes have enough skin to go around. He suggested taking it off the back of my leg or somewhere unseen, he didn't really get where i was coming from.
On the bus on the way home a blind lady got on, the bus was packed to the point where people were standing in the aisles so it was hard for her to navigate. She was asking aloud if the bus went through Papakura. Nobody said a thing. She asked again with no response before saying HELLO then getting off the bus again. Why do people suck so much>? You would think out of 50 people that one person would know the answer to her question but nobody gave a shit. The people here all wear sneakers with jeans, its criminal! fuck you Auckland.

Marina Abramovic

Read a great book on Marina Abramovic from the library, couldn't get it out because I am not enrolled. ya. Her performative works are experiences that she wanted the audience to share. Seeing her perform these acts on her own body you can imagine yourself in her situation, her body as your own. There is a fascination that comes with seeing people self harm; you know it hurts and you try to understand their particular reason for doing it.

Her work is 'pure process', the end result is not the focus of the piece it is the act and the doing that is the point of interest. In this work she is submissive and totally at the mercy of the spectators, in an interview she states that the 'courage to do the piece was male'.... whhaaaatttt? The documentation although not the focus if the work is amazing, the progression over time captured in photographs shows her eventually naked and bleeding and it looks like she has tears in her eyes; other than that she shows no emotion.

Balklan Baroque 1997 involved her cleaning heaps and heaps of bloodied beef bones. very labour intensive, punishing, enduring. only really interested in it for the fact that it used bones and cleaned them... dot dot dot

your skin

"Oddly enough each animal has just enough brains to tan its own hide. Brain tanning produces a beautiful buckskin and it does require a bit of work to produce it."-SOURCE


WOOOOAH! That site describes a few ways in which you can tan a hide and gives a few tips and methods on preventing it from shrinking. Apparently the tanning process destroys genetic information, that is a very interesting point when it comes to issues of identity and ownership. I found another website which must is quite funny Human leather Exclusive. Haha. You can even find some library books that are bound in human leather. The reason being that it was cheaply available at the time (late 1800's), durable and waterproof. The memoirs of George Walton, a highway man are bound in his own skin, but most of the books bound in human skin are medical books. So it can be done, I'm just unsure how different it will be using living flesh.

Nicola Costantino

Nicola Costantino works with leather and latex to create what looks similar to human skin because of the nipples! creepy and so cool! Her website is so great I love the little pig that navigates the page. One review i read by Roberta Smith denouncing her work as tasteless and gimmicky. It seems a little that way to me, a bit too obvious and a 'one liner' but nice ideas all the same.

150 words concept/ areas of interest

I want to explore the relationship between humans and animals in terms of skin and other things produced by the body that can be fetishised and commoditized. I will explore ways in which you can adorn your body and ways you can use your body for adornment. I am interested in the permanence of acts performed on the body, cutting hair, tattoos, skinning animals, shearing them etc. The way we are repulsed by images of human bodies at times, bare skin, hair is fascinating yet to wear the skin of another being is normal and not something we can relate to. I will look at Abject art and feminism and artists that deal with this such as Kiki Smith and Cindy Sherman. Lacan's theories of the Gaze and Maurice Merleau Ponty's phenomenology of perception will be some things i look at theoretically.

writings from manapouri

I once spent $320 on a pair of boots. Leather of course because it lasts and it means QUALITY. They broke three times and have a hole in the toe. I can't wear them anymore, I'm not that keen on wearing someone or something elses skin on top of my own. I did a project on tattoos earlier in 2008, peoples opinions on skin are wonderful, the permanence of tattoos (permanence?) people aren't permanent. Its pretty precious to have that mind set. We all love our skin in different ways, we need it to live, to experience the world, to touch; it defines us.
Race-colour-tattoos
Tattoos are bad, so are piercings. So abnormal and SO extreme. Watching the body modification DVD i could not believe the breast implants and face lifts, yet somehow these are acceptable, 'normal' because they fit the standard beauty ideal, they 'enhance'. Tattos are beautiful and personal to their owners, they are unique. Breast implants. well.... they're tits.

I can't believe i own leather boots, or that i was proud of them, polished them, conditioned them, whatever.

On my own skin: It's nice. I have scars on my arms, neck, and chest mainly from burns. They don't worry me and I don't dee a need to change them or hide them. I like having my skin, i wouldn'twant anyone else walking around in it, not that they would want to you would assume.

I want to fix my precious boots, patch up the hole in the toe just to make them whole. I'm not throwing them away, giving them to anyone or selling them i don't see any point in that and it makes no statement whatsoever rather it ignores something very important, a change in ideals that has taken place. I feel that I should try to give something back after taking so much, always taking indirectly to avoid guilt and blame.

I will talk to some tattooists around auckland to see if anyone does scarification, also to a tanner or someone that works with leather products to find out what sort of process is involved. I want to get a small section cut out of my toe, cured and tanned then sewn onto my boot to fix the hole. My boots already disgust me and i am unsure how I would feel about them after doing this.

On Tattoos
I thought about getting one to mark a big change in my life, outwardly altering my body to let people know about it. This is a very personal project, i want to say that in doing this that the work is just for me but it can't be. I'm not hurting or pressuring anybody else, i think i will just show them what i have done and see what they think. People are so stupid. I expect people to be repulsed (if they thought hair was gross see this...)

ummmm, why?
I'm doing this to show that I strongly believe in something. I want to explore the term 'activism' and what this means in the way that i relate to people through my artwork. It's not a huge statement when you look at some of the people on BMEZine, it's pretty weak actually. One small piece of skin when I ate the flesh of other animals for twenty years, and the wound will heal. I'm in two minds about who this work is for, the process and action is for me, the result is for them.

DOCUMENTATION
I loathe it. A lot of the time i see no point in it but i guess it is necessary when you are at school. In this case however i will thoroughly document the process because it is so important, even the simple things like cleansing my skin and looking after it. Recording audio as well as images will allow a wide variety of combinations when putting the work together, it could possibly be quite performative.

HUMANE

random thoughts and unrelated ideas

they have places everywhere in the city where you can dispose of cigarette butts, specially made bins for this 'dirty' habit. Playing with those words it would be interesting to have little stations similar to cigarette bins except distributing lube, tissues and porn.

Looking at gender and sexuality a lot it seems, departing from animal human body issues and becoming more interested in our perceptions of ourselves. After displaying my work in a female bathroom I thought more about gender, sexuality and stereotypes. We have so many choices and decisions to make yet when it comes to these little toilet symbols we ave only tow. Next time I'm on photoshop I'm going to play around with the symbols and colours and create some simple altered images.

On the gender sexuality buzz, i want to collect images of penises, not REAL ones just silly ones that people have drawn, perverse like Sarah Lucas' work in that the images can be cucumbers, anything phallic. Just as a side project and something fun.

I want to paint some hair onto the wall, so that its under the surface but still there all bumpy. If only i had some paint.

Our disregard of animals extends to human life, people starve while we spend thousands on necessities like heated towel rails and ed hardy tshirts (if you have or want one of these you are ridiculous. and should die) I saw a zebra skin floor mat at Mansion house on Kawau Island. It was eew yuck. It would be cool to make a human floor mat, treat others the way you want to be treated.. photocopy myself and stick it to the floor, maybe paint my skin first, have me lying all romantically and feminine on the floor with feminine aspects but also animal. It makes me think of Ophelia, hair floating in the water, dreamy, beautiful, tragic.

Guilt free mashmellows? say what?? Weak soy latte in a bowl with marshmellows you say? *dies* Its almost as bad as a decaf short black, just doesn't make any sense. I work as a barista, people feel guilty eating marshmellows because of the sugar content. Nobody really thinks about the cost of their actions in terms of others, most people have a very short sighted view and can only think of the effects their actions have on themselves and their immediate community. Probably because you can see directly how your actions effect others. Oh well Keep trying! Its hard to see past the here and now and whats convenient, especially in a city like this.

I was thinking of a way to display the self portrait photos i took and think that something small and intimate would be nice. I don't want the body to be too identifiable, main reason being because I would be embarassed (changed my tune on that one...). It looks almost like a landscape because of the perspective and viewpoint, putting it into a small frame would subvert this and make it more like a body again. I know what I mean but I can't put it into words :(

I went to a lecture given by cellular biologist Bruce Lipton on Wednesday night. Very interesting but nothing new in terms of concept. It covered key ideas in his last book and introduced ideas from his new one. It discussed evolution and how our consciousness effects our genes, fractal evolution, nature based on fractal patterns. Positive change, think positive BE positive. I did an essay on body and mind in second year i wish i could find it!! It had a lot of Merleau Ponty's ideas on phenomenology in it and it ruled but my disposable fingertip google knowledge means i don't retain information for any amount of time.

"We can't solve the problems by using the same kind of thinking that created the problem"-Albert Einstein, who by the way was vegetarian like all the other cool kids

seventysevenwords

animals hair fur skin body adornment exploitation use beauty aesthetic fetish sexual context repulsion discarded waste skin leather purpose precious scar vegan hunting tradition consumption compassion human jewellery activism derived equality rights flawed eternity tattoo dead luxurious glamorous permanence decay suffer exotic drawing relational disgust experience normality beliefs opinions reaction perfection idealist modification extreme publicity boots tanning industry commodity life object placement documentation fascination tactile honour esteem longevity humane acceptance process pain normal livelyhood routine feathers products

installation at school + critty rarunks

Responses from people seeing my work were good, quite what I expected. SOme words..
messy
gross
loose
tension
fluid
fur ball
linear
one dimensional
delicate Vs icky
Transparent
translucent
It was much different displayed on a mirror in a girl's toilet. It also had feminist undertones, with the sexual way in which the figure is posed. I wanted the figure to look beautiful and natural. The pose isn't explicitly sexual but i can see that by using my own hair, womens' hair and a pose like this the work cant help but give the impression its something feminist. damn.

The most interesting thing I took from the critique was when somebody said they thought of the hair differently when they knew it was mine. Associating it with a person, me claiming ownership over it gave it more familiarity i think. It was a deliberate collection of hair rather than an accidental find in a plughole. I am really interested in Brooke's work and the bird feathers she has tacked to the wall, she seems to have come from a very similar background to me and has taken a different approach, i really look forward to seeing more of her work. The girl who is from korea is doing interesting stuff aswell, i think it appealed to me at first because it uses the female form which is a feature in my work at present.

When i removed the hair from the miror it left an impression on the glass, very faint whitish lines of soapy dirt from the hair product. This was nice and subtle, you can still see it a week later it just looks like someone has had soapy hands on the mirror but if you look closer you can see the hair impressions.

Mirrors are a very feminine symbol, the mirror on my bus the other morning was vibrating insanely and i took a small clip of it. It distorted my face and looked unreal, then as soon as the bus started moving again it went back to normal..

Victorian Hair jewellery

For people in the Civil War and Victorian eras, jewelry made from hair was a way of both mourning and celebrating the lives of their departed loved-ones. In addition to having hairwork commissioned after a person was deceased, many people gave living friends and relatives gifts of jewelry made from their own hair as testament to their bond, or possibly even as an invitation to romance.

The bracelet here was made by contemporary hair artist Lucy Cadwallader, who says it best by noting that this type of ornament was “one of the most personal pieces of jewelry one could bestow upon another. Hair provided an intimate connection between the deceased and the living.”

She also noted on her website that “Upon the death of her beloved Albert in 1861, Queen Victoria was consumed with grief. She mandated that only mourning jewelry and hair jewelry be worn at court. With the onset of the Civil War in 1861, the popularity of hair jewelry grew. Women would wear lockets and brooches with locks of their husband’s hair. Soldiers would often carry with them a watch chain made from their loved one’s hair, close to their heart.”

Catharine Hodson @ dpag

I'm taking a wild stab and guessing that this is the one that made sophie gag.

Touching the unthinkable
The artist was recently successfully treated for breast cancer. As part of her research into this disease and its clinical treatment Hodson built up a rich body of information that included recording other women's experiences and that of friends, family and medical professionals.
I'm unsure about many details surrounding this work but i can tell you how it makes me feel!
The hair in a bowl, well. its just like a trip to the hairdresser, it is not as successful as the hairballs which are far more grotesque in the way they have been deliberately crafted. More of the artists hand is shown in the hairball necklace, its not every day you see one of those... whereas taking the cut hair out of context and just putting it in a bowl is just... well it reminds me of an urn i would sleep in if i had been cremated.

vito hannibal acconci

Shelley Jackson

[AUTHOR]

TALKS WITH

Vito Acconci

[POET/ARTIST/ARCHITECT]

SJ: You’d long since left the page by this time, but in your piece Trademark you turn yourself into a printing press. You’re biting yourself, you smear the bites with ink, printer’s ink, specifically, and then you print them on—what?

VA: Anything. I could print them on a piece of paper, I could print them on the wall, I could print them on another person’s body…

SJ: So you were the writer, you were the printing press, you were also the page…

VA: Was I the page? I bit myself, but I didn’t make a bite print on myself. I used the bite to print something else.

SJ: I thought of the bite as itself a print on the page of your body.

VA: It’s a print, but it’s not a distributable print. It’s not a distributable print until the printer’s ink is applied. This was pre-Gutenberg Bible!

SJ: When I first heard about this project I didn’t realize you made prints. I thought you were just biting yourself and making marks that way—and the mouth is the place of speech, or language—so I thought of this project as the most self-referential writing loop, like you had taken your early interest in making writing refer only to itself about as far as it could go. But at the same time—

VA: At the same time there was this urge to publish! It’s like I wanted this ultimate privacy to then publish itself, then be public.

SJ: You said once that the bite mark was like a wound, but a wound that you wanted to infect other people with. That’s a strong metaphor for writing. A complicated one, because there’s this self-inflicted violence, or maybe it’s sexual, you can’t really tell… Maybe it’s hungry!

VA: Or maybe it’s very, very lonely, and there’s nothing else to do… An oral fixation seems to be operating in that piece. It’s not that you want to touch a part of your body, you want to ingest it.

SJ: You’ve said that at the time you thought of these activities as coolly systematic, but that looking back they seem pretty psychologically motivated.

VA: It was an art time in which psychological terms had been kind of abolished, so I don’t think I knew how to think that way. I was thinking I was doing a version of minimal art, except for the fact that I was using my body. But that “except for the fact that you’re using your body” makes a big difference! I remember I did a performance at the end of 1970, and also in the performance was Kathy Dillon, the person I was living with then, and Dennis Oppenheim—we were close friends then. I’m naked from the waist up. Kathy puts on very heavy lipstick and covers the front of my body with like a million kisses. Then I go over to Dennis, who’s standing at the wall, facing the wall, also naked from the waist up, and I rub the front of my body onto his back, so transferring Kathy’s kisses to him. And I remember Dennis afterward saying, “I had no idea the work was going in this direction!” We thought this was about color transfer. Wasn’t about color transfer.

SJ: It was another printing press! But a very sexy one.

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I never thought about the implicatipons of making prints with the hair or something from your body, turning a one off work into a commodity of sorts. As Acconci mentioned making the private public. I like the impermanence of the bite mark but at the same time it comes accross as a form of self harm.

High rise 1980- so cool, huge crude red penis soaring into the air.

Meret Oppenheim

furry cup of awesomeness
Fur feels amazing (on the animal), but on a cup, something you feel with your mouth and taste rather than stroke with your fingers? more discussion to comeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

drawings

The original idea with drawing with hair was to write something similar to what would be written with lipstick on a mirror, something 'sexy', something fetishized. The 'call me' text was a bit lame, maybe if i used multiple layers of hair and made it more elaborate it would look better but i decided to experiment more with drawing. I drew a self portrait on the wall of our shower, I used myself mainly to get the correct proportions but still didn't manage that, it's more of a rough sketch. I had to work quickly because the hair would dry out and start peeling off the wall after 10 minutes or so, especially in places of more concentration.

experimentation

I collected all my hair over the week and managed to make quite a sizable hairball. I wanted to explore ideas of beauty and repulsion surrounding materials worn by us such as fur and leather and compare those to the use of human products as adornment. I made a hairball necklace type thing and tried to do glamorous beauty shots using it but this was too hard trying to be photographer and model so what resulted were a series of portraits making the body a sort of landscape. The hairball looks like a hairball, all straggley and gross just placed on the skin. I like to think the curls compliment the curves of the body with their soft lines. Lighting has quite a dramatic effect on the feel of the images, the soft focus looks quite romantic and the colours are warm whereas the harsher green light makes the hair look more alien and casts a lot more shadow. Maybe i shouldn't have these pictures on the internet but I don't see any problem with them and don't feel any connection with them in the sense of feeling exposed or ashamed, i just used my body as a medium.


By the way, american dictionary you can fuck off with telling me there is no U in the word colour because there IS! and its not aloominum its ALUMINIUM. p.s i hate you and your contents save 3 or four people