VII-->II

Pictures of final set-up minus the actual art work

2009-06-08T21:53:00.000-07:00

That's it^^^ right there, the technicians come and set up the AV equipment for you before it gets assessed because there aren't enough monitors etc to go around. Imagine those three monitors on top of here with the sound on and the lips etc and thats what it was. Underneath the tablecloth (which was a sheet) are heaps of different words for vagina. You can barely see them so either have to look closer and find the deeper meaning or just ignore them.

Video Art: Dead or Alive?

2009-06-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

Chris, Cynthia. Video Art: Dead or Alive. Afterimage; Nov/Dec 1996, Vol. 24 Issue 3, p4.
ISSN [03007472]

This article proved to be a little bit irrelevant because it was so old although the last one i read was incredible!! This pales in comparison, here's what i did salvage from it;
From what i gather the author thinks that video as a medium peaked in the 1990's and now due to budget cuts and is image as a medium for students and amateurs it is DEAD.
The temptation to cross over from video art to film and earn real money money money drew a lot of artists away from it. Video was seen then (and is now) as lacking in critical legitimacy when compared to film, and almost as a testing ground for artists that want to venture in to film making. Salla Tykka looks to be one of these people (that is a very shallow statement) but she draws on film history using a score reminiscent of Hitchcock, and her films have a kind of narrative, they are constructed and not performances with some sort of narrative.(note on her website 'the F wrod' haha) Her works Zoo and Cave are one of the very few video pieces that i actually sat down and watched, that along with the current exhibition of Yinka Shonibare. I was pissed off to find that his video looped after watching it for ages, i never did see the whole thing :( Video with narrative does not work as well as a reversed loop i feel. I find that if a video work is part of an installation i am less likely to watch it and more likely to give it as much attention as i would a painting. For this reason i decided to show my video works by themselves and not as part of a wider installation.
"Video, it has been noted, is a field in which it is harder than usual to make money"-Martha Rositer, 'Video, sharing the utopian moment'. No shit.
The article then goes on to state that few artists are 'able' to turn their work into something commercial. This lady is missing the point... In the early 90's it was TV culture, that has been replaced by net culture. Net culture is awesome. Anybody can make a video, most people in NZ own or have access to something that can capture footage. That doesn't make video redundant as a medium with this sudden influx of accidental snapshots and film that look good made by aunty Di and Granny Cush.

Hair ideas from ages ago...

2009-06-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

Thought i better put these up and discuss them a little bit. I really didn't know what to do with the hair, after bathing in it, eating it, making balls, photographing it, drawing with it, i'm out of ideas. When i arranged them like this i liked that you could see each individually formed ball. The linear format suggested time which i liked because it showed the process of collecting the hair each day. I thought about putting each ball with other items and objects i had cast off that day such as make up removing pads, dirty clothes etc. This would be a lot like Tracey Emin's 1999 work 'My bed' in the way that it would use things just 'as they were' as such just taken ot of context. THis would not convey the message i would like though, i want people to look at the work and be fascinated and drawn to the aestheitc of it as well as feeling uncomfortable and repulsed.Some of them are quite beautiful and sculptural, the way the hair curves and is so three dimensional. It also looks beautiful just stuck to the wall of the shower, very art nouveau with the curves, dark lines and organic shapes. The above image is like some sort of mythical bird or fairy i heart it.

Real Bodies: Video in the 1990's

2009-06-03T19:41:00.000-07:00

tele- distance

Real Bodies: Video in the 1990's
Art History [0141-6790] Lajer- Burcharth, Ewa. Year 1997 volume 20 pages 185-213
Fantastic article i read online in the database, 29 pages long so i skimmed it but wish i could have read the whole thing!

Gary Hill I believe it is an image in light of the other (1991-1992)

Video work using images of text and the male body, rotating as if to imitate the turning of pages which can be heard through the audio with the installation. Hill 'defamiliarizes' the body, uses the screen as a mirror. Ok. i took down notes too quickly and now i have no idea what context they were in. Lajer-Burchart mentions Lacan a lot, firstly his idea of " The Real", experiencing ones bod as a remnant or loss, incompleteness of the self under the gaze.
The monitor is a ubiquitous object that structures our experiences and reality of ourselves- how true is this for the majority of the population?

Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.- Bill hicks

Inasmuch it is always taking place 1990

'You constantly see and thus imagine yourself and the world as a screen image'-pg 190 Lajer- Burcharth, Ewa

This work features sixteen caseless monitors, why didn't i think of that? Each shows a fragment of his body; foot, torso, chest, back, diddle. By saying diddle did i make it awkward...? These images together create a whole but fragmented body, intimate close ups of skin that barely seem to move creates abstract shapes and textures. In the article his work is described as 'anti- television', it does not tell a story, has no narrative, (it loops) and destructs the television as an object, taking it out of its original frame and letting the artists skin become the screen.

You relocate trust and knowledge of your body to the image on the screen. An example that comes to mind is looking fat in a photo, you're going to believe what the image tells you. Rather than looking down at your physical body you judge yourself based on images of it in photographs and videos because you believe that this is what other people see. By YOU i mean humans collectively and not necessarily everyone or even the person reading this. We think that technology knows us better than we know ourselves, and we put our trust in it. Scales to weigh yourself, personality tests online, the women onscreen having ideal bodies, faces, hair. wan.

Mona HatoumCorps etranger 1994

This work is my favourite of Hatoum's, it consists of a cylindrical viewing booth with circular projections on the floor of endoscopic views of the inside and outside of her body. Being projected from above you have the option of walking around the image or through it, becoming the screen yourself. She has recorded the sound of her heartbeat and breathing which plays inside the installation. The Real Bodies article describes the work as a sexual threat, vulgar, disturbing and distasteful (awesome :)) The images projected move between interior and exterior views and are all unfamiliar views of the body that are usually excluded from images of the self. These views of the body have been made visually intolerable by dominant cultural representation of the body. We are use to seeing images such as the ones i have made, 'pretty', sexual, feminine. The viewing booth is like when you go to a sex shop and pay $10 to go and have a beat while watching porn. eeew. This is so unlike porn even though it is images of the artists vagina and anus among other things. The extremely close up microscopic views are like medical images so you don't get those erotic connotations of sex, penetration etc.

My work definitely has those sexual connotations. The video of the lips (Edit 1) it very sensual, the dribbling slightly removes it from being purely sexual, making it clumsier and dirty. Mastication of the self is very different to this, more violent, dirtier in a literal sense, more feelings of abjection, disgust. It feels like the lips are now in control, they are still the same lips but have shown that they are not purely a sexual object. The hair being consumed is of the same body as the lips. Both hair and lips are fetishized, revered, beautiful, feminine. This is all subverted when the female is consuming itself. Apart from the fact that nobody would be willing to eat hair for an art project, it is important that the lips belong to me, that it was my idea to 'endure' this act and I'm doing it to myself without (direct) pressure from someone else.
Red Porn is my favourite as i feel it can stand on its own as a video work. It combines the previous two videos in the way that it is still sexual but the more you watch it the more you are repulsed by it. It is something you want to look at but in the same tone feel that you shouldn't be viewing. The image of the lips first came about when trying to imitate screen siren posters with their seductive smiles and inviting pouts. Stills from my footage could be mistaken as a still from a Hollywood film.

Imagined resolutions- photoshop

2009-06-03T16:02:00.000-07:00

I put a still of my footage in here, it doesn't look any different to a close up in a movie. As a still image this does nothing! Maybe i should have photoshopped one from the trichophagia clip with the hair in the mouth. I was thinking about putting the video in a more casual setting rather than a gallery situation. I think it could be cool to have it playing on a tiny TV hidden somewhere like in the corner of my desk in this computer room, just hanging out... not trying to be too art and more contented with being a video. Just as a note I like this a crotch-height, i think that would make me feel a bit weird and apprehensive about going near it.
I went in to some businesses on Queen street and left letters with them explaining my artwork and asking if it were possible that i play it on the televisions they have in store. Glassons has a block of nine case-less screens on the wall that build one large image, and Bond and Bond have an arrangement similar to the one shown above. So far they haven't got back to me saying yay or neigh neigh but fingers crossed! I would like to have it playing in there with customers around but i doubt this would be allowed. I would sneakily put it in there and play it but that is a little bit activist and would interfere with the feeling of the work.
On a big screen projected in the dark...Again it is hard to judge the effect because this is not a moving image. It looks a lot like a cinema in the dark an i think it would need to have some sort of sound with it to fully engage the viewer. I want to get away from a cinematic presentation because this work simply does not compare to a film, it is video for a reason! It is quite confrontational in this setting, you can't get away from it and I don't want it to be like that, i want to leave space for the viewer to imagine things. I found a good post on video art that provoked a lot of discussion, read it here. I have posted the lips videos on youtube, i think this is quite a good setting for them. I labeled the close up one of the lips sideways "Red Porn", not particularly imaginative but I had just watched some Green Porn. I would like to think that people would search porn and get my video as a result and find that all it is is lips. It is quite sexual in a sense but it isn't close to porn at all.
Here is a list of 'related videos' that come up when you watch mine on youtube...
Horny Lesbians having lesbo sex lesbian playtime
Free Big Booty Porn
Masturbating
Girl Fuck Porn
Lego Counterstrike...?
you get the picture.
After thinking about presenting the televisions on top of fabric or something i thought i could wrap the TV's in red sequined fabric. I made this in photoshop using a pic of a tv and a pic of the magical fabric. For me this particular fabric connotes to-be-looked-at-i-cant-help-it-but-its-hideous-ness. I want a red sequin TV. I want three.

VIDEO ART

Does it hold anybody's attention? Why do people crowd to watch it at galleries and just walk past paintings? The blog post i mentioned earlier was titled "A Painting is worth a thousand moving images". It takes more time to watch a video, if you don't like a painting you can walk past it, whereas with moving image you want to find out what happens next, humans are very inquisitive. I explored this in an artwork last year that seemed to be just Bars and Tone (that particular version omits the tone for some reason), the tone plays and people would stand there staring at these bars of colour expecting a film to start. The bars and tone just looped continuously. This familiarity with television and film is what drives us to watch it even in a gallery setting. TV is a lazy way of getting information essentially, it's fed to you while you sit there and all you have to do is stare at its carefully calculated stimulating visual images. I have a problem with playing my work on plain televisions because they are just too familiar, they're ugly and they are no longer just screens they are TV.

Final installation

2009-06-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

I played around a little bit with the arrangement of the monitors, there's not a hell of a lot you can do but it is surprising what difference little adjustments can make to the overall feeling of the work. I would really have loved the Close up video to be played on a larger screen, or projected onto a wall BUT the lighting conditions in the studios do not allow for that. I could put it somewhere with less light but that wouldn't suit either... darkness and that image =seedy yuck.
A huge screen would be great, i looked into hiring one but it didn't quote any prices, i was thinking of getting one of those hanging screens that they use for advertising, it somehow projects from the rear of the screen.. i don't know :(
I've decided to leave the sound of the water running playing with my monitors, mainly to drown out the humming noise made by the crusty broken TV sets. I wish i had a screen with no edges, it looks great played on a mac but i would hate to have that shitty apple logo glaring at people
appleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleappleapple
which means covering the framing of the monitors with something. THEN you would need a flat surface or some sort of casing surrounding them and it all gets a bit complicated. I have had video works inside little boxes before and it didn't make a huge difference to how they looked it was just a lame formality that i felt i should use.
I really wanted to incorporate the hair i have been collecting into my final work but it doesn't seem to quite fit. I like having the hairballs arranged in a linear format in individual bunches. This could work if the TV monitors were also in a grid like formation but i would rather have them slightly facing each other so that they envelop the viewer.

Collages and arrangements

2009-05-31T19:46:00.000-07:00

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.

I was arranging all of the penfifteen pictures on the wall and wondering what to do with them. The interesting element (for me) is who has drawn them. I arranged them on photoshop just to see if any trends were emerging apart from the obvious fact that boys draw more elaborate and grotesque penises than females do. aaand well thats all i found :) oh and art kids are awesome penis drawers aswell, especially emma catastrophic and her multi tool penis which you can see if you go to the penis blog.
I think i will leave this project to a later date when i have more drawings because there simply aren't enough at the moment :)

RED PORN

2009-05-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

Playing around with colour. The original clip was very muted, pastel tones even though a i had bright red lipstick on. I played around with RGB balance and levels to try and make the lips stand out a bit more. Final cut has similar tools to photoshop in this respect so i found it easy to get the look i wanted, although it could be a little less red. I tested the DVD's on a TV earlier and the contrast was ludacris but it turns out it was just that particular TV. phew. A little unhappy with the DVD's, i tried my very best to get them to match up, looping footage and putting similar lip movements at the beginning and end of the dvd's but all of them have a slight glitch.
FCP doesn't like HD footage. I don't like FCP. After watching all the tutorials on the apple website, no, enduring all the tutorials TWICE i still could not burn a dvd, after seeing IT guy he gave me a handout that explained it, missing out 567876 of the steps they tell you to do in the online tutorials. THANK YOU!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.
this video is a great altered version of the first edit i made. I love that it is essentially the same video it has just been zoomed in and turned around. I put it on youtube, its so moisty and gross like a seacreature. Much like marilyn minter. possibly too much although the display of my work will be vastly different to hers. Hers was situated amongst billboards and advertising, mine will be a little more intimate and less in your face than her work. I feel her work is quite removed from the human body whereas mine looks very visceral but it confuses which body part you are looking at.

Comments from friends
vaginal discharge :)
beautious
im gonna be honest... its a little creepy yea
Wow, cool. Strange, but very cool.
imagine how many yuk ppl will touch their bits watchin that. eeekk
wasnt doing anything untoward, watched with interest mingled with that mixture of disgust and fascination which seems to be appropriate.

plans. planes. automobiles. television times three

2009-05-27T03:58:00.001-07:00

This is how i want my final installation to look. I made this on google sketchup which is a painful painful program to use. Probably not going to hang a monitor on the wall because i think they are rear projection not flat screen so it would just look silly. I am wondering weather or not to pt things on the table with the monitors, like the hair?? Unsure yet i really need to see what it looks like in the space first to see if it needs anything else...

mastication of the self

2009-05-26T15:00:00.001-07:00

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.

Chewing hair. love it. loving the dirty dribble, the moistness grossness and the ewww. I've played around with this a bit because it is quite short, i slowed it down and the feeling is totally different, less abjection and repulsion and more fascination. I played it at 20% of the normal speed and the detail in the hair is incredible! Its almost more painful watching it in slow mo, like the mouth doesn't want to eat the hair and is struggling to do so. In the video above the mouth is ravaging it and chomping it in a frenzied manner. I also tried a video where i had portions of it in this jerky motion and parts of it at 20% speed. Not sure if i like it??? I think when played next to the other two videos it would look better to have one in contrast played at high speed. The other two are at pretty much normal frame rate BUT they do not have the hair in the mouth. So maybe playing the hair one at a range of speeds will tie it in more closely with the other two because of the differing subject matter. geeeeezuz. Oh and i cannot for the life of me figure out how to burn a dvd!!! and i can't do any tutorials because i forgot my headphones. poo poo.

Video work

2009-05-25T21:25:00.000-07:00

billy apple your website is stupid. and i can't see anything on it apart from a link to email you. I was trying to find the work i had seen in which billifred applehead displays used tissues from nose bleeds he has collected and other items of abjection but to no avail. I remember watching a video about it last year, maybe this year????

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.
First edit of lips. Why the fuck did i not upload this two weeks ago! because you didn't know how and had to sit through tutorials by an american australian man oooh goody my two favourite accents.

mike hunt

2009-05-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

Ok so the word cunt is pretty taboo. Interestingly enough it mentions on wikipedia that Australians and New Zealanders use it frequently and sometimes as a term of endearment. Good cunt or "GC" as it is known on rutland road is something i hear daily.
see you next tuesday.

copher, cunt, pussy, twat, cooter, beaver, fish lips, taco, camel toe, muff, snatch, fuck hole, garage, oven, love button, penis glove, cock sock, cock pocket, JJ, hoohah, bajingo, cum dumpster, sperm bottle, goop chute, slit, trim, quim, pooter, love rug, poontang, poonanie, cooch, tunnel of love, vertical bacon sandwich, bearded clam, cookie, cooleyhopper, nookie, the pink, honey pot, cunny, vag, meat curtains, hatchet wound, putz, fur burger, box, front bottom, gash, kebab, kitty, minge, snapper, catfish, vertical smile, lovebox, love canal, nana, flower, the cum dump, chocha, black hole, sperm sucker, fish sandwich, cock warmer, whisker biscuit, carpet, deep socket, cum craver, cock squeezer, slice of heaven, flesh cavern, the great divide, cherry, tongue depressor, clit slit,laps, fuzz box, fuzzy wuzzy, glory hole, grumble, man in the boat, mud flaps, mound, peach, piss flaps, the fish flap, he furry cup, stench-trench, wizard's sleeve, DNA dumpster, tuna town, split dick, bikini bizkit, cock holster, cockpit, snooch, kitty kat, poody tat, grassy knoll, cold cut combo, Jewel box, rosebud, curly curtains, furry furnace, slop hole, velcro love triangle, nether lips, where Uncle's doodle goes, altar of love, cupid's cupboard, bird's nest, bucket, cock-chafer, love glove, serpent socket, spunk-pot, hairy doughnut, fun hatch, spasm chasm, red lane, stinky speedway, bacon hole, belly entrance, sugar basin, sweet briar, breakfast of champions, wookie, fish mitten, fuck pocket, hump hole, pink circle, silk igloo, scrambled eggs between the legs, black oak, Republic of Labia, juice box, Golden Palace, fetus flaps, skins, sausage wallet, Holiest of Holies, sugar hole, The Death of Adam, home plate, Deer Hoof, Golden Arches, Cats Paw, Mule Nose, Yo Yo Smuggler, Mumbler, Dinner Roll, Crotch Waffle, Piss Fenders, crack, Melvin, Dove Breast, Brakepads, Vedgie, Slurpy, Vacuum Vulva, Pastrami Flaps, Hot Tamaki Walk, Buffalo Gums,Rooster Jaws, Wagon Ruts, Beaver Teeth, Mumble Pants, Ninja Boot, Marcia, Skin Canoe, Fatty, Mossy Jaw, The Big W, Chia Hole, Lip Jeans, Beetle Hood, Hungry Minge, Welly Top, Frum, Pancake Fold, Tongue Roll, Bologna Flap-Over, Furrogi (Poland), Fortune Nookie, Bearded Taco, Calamari Cockring, Displabia, Slot Pocket, Bluntfrunt, Fishamjig, Pole Magnet, Pocket Pie, Clamarama, kitty cage, Chicken's tongue, Conch shell, Crack of heaven, Dog's mouth, Door of life, Fly catcher, Fruit cup, Jelly roll, Lobster pot, bunny tuft, knish, her asshole neighbor, lotus, nappy dugout, moneymaker, womens weapon, tackle box, bone hider, red sea, pizzo, jizz recepticle, The Helmut Hide-A-Way, hairy heaven, furry 8 ball rack, crave cave, arbys with fur, fish canyon, toolshed, snake charmer, Furby, Enchilada of love, Ham sandwich, Camarillo brillo, Brazilian caterpillar, dick rack, boy in the canoe, flesh tuxedo, Mound of Venus, queef quarters, Venus butterfly, cream canal, apple pie, pie, wet mark, private area, thresher, punash, salami garage, slurpee machine, pink cookie, penalty box, ground zero, meat crease, bait, birth canal, holy grail, pole hole, pork pie, fuzz bucket, one-eyed python trail, bubble gum by the bum, stink rink, theme park, saloon doors, pink truffle, bitter & twisted, burger bar, meat counter, temperamental ringpiece, python syphon, big bud, the Wombsday Book, the condo downstate, snake lake, the indoor barbecue, pound cake, beef tomato, tickled pink, launch pad, horn of plenty, the indoor picnic, hamper of goodies, flapped bap, bonefish, close encounter with the turd kind, sperm bank, man's charity bash, bush tucker, midnight dip, the one-door vulva, the welcome opponent, the Twatlantic Ocean, temporary lodgings, field of dreams, bean, cooze, old catchers mitt, devil's hole, lucy, pish buffet, pooswaa, poonaner, davey jones locker, pink panther, tinker bell, south mouth, dick eater, wonder bread, wolly bolly, foxhole, hot pocket, head catcher, Lawrence of A Labia, silk funnel, dick driver, purple people penis eater, ponchita, cherry pop tart, fat rabbit, scunt, pee jaws, mingus, The Notorious V.A.G., dugout, babyoven, penis parking, cooter muffin, the promised land, cha cha, the shrine, bitch ditch, fury pink mink, mammal hole, ever-lasting cum stopper, the toothless blow job, happy flappy, wilt chamberlian's daily glove, the code defierthe salt water taffy factory, mommy's pie, the easy bake oven, the deflower patch, the virginator, the schlong sucker, the dea bone patch, the vegitarian's temptation, the vegan store, the blow hole, the pump protector, bag pipe, Spitball Bullseye, meat wagon, pickle stinker, jezebel's smell, yoni, willys haven, scrumpter, peach, sweat box, yeast pocket, penis warmer, tampon tunnel, penis pothole, cucumber canal, egg drop Box, sperm shack, dick dungeon, cock curator, b.o.b.'s bungalow, mommy parts, tuna pot pie, nice slice, peter vise, rack of clam, peters grove, penis purse, grandest canyon, fish dish, banana box, tuna spread, pink portal, count fapula, red river gorge, happy valley, revolving in/out door, baby zipper, richards house, stop-n-pop, bone polisher, packin shack, weiner wrap, clap trap, dildo hotel, axe gash, pearl hotel, sea food six pack, clam canal, coose canal, dick deposit, wand waxer, vidgie, erie canal, candy kiss, gauntlet, round mound of beehound,lick n' stick, lap flounder, tomahawk chop, chin-chin, pachinko, cuntry pie, lip tip, the big casino, one eyed worm hole, amazon forest, cock cave, fuck donut, coochie pop, babby, wet seal, pissy froth hole, bald biscuit, the unmentionable, mans ruin, peeshie, hairy potter, courtney cocksleve, panty hamster,deep pink, jaws of life, gizmo, faith, cock magnet, slippery slide, Meat tunnel, pink heaven, squid, dick basket, hot spot, poochika, pudding, bowl, love cave, squeeze-box, he bone collector, goodie basket, depository, pink turtleneck, bread-box, little debbie, pole hole, pandora's box,snail tracker, cuntzilla, homebase, pud pocket, bear trap, indian bones and the temple of poon, chanch, big montana, noochie, choot, golden valley, nappy roots, dick mitten, mystical fold, red bread, meat locker, douche luge, pushin cushion, cocktease

www.urbandictionary.com

Even Parliaments are not immune from punning uses; as recalled by former Australian Prime Minister Gogh Whitlam

Never in the House did I use the word which comes to mind. The nearest I came to doing so was when Sir Winton Turnbull, a member of the cavalleria rusticana, was raving and ranting on the adjournment and shouted: "I am a Country member". I interjected "I remember". He could not understand why, for the first time in all the years he had been speaking in the House, there was instant and loud applause from both sides.
The word cunt is only insulting to Americans and over zealous feminists who don't realise its beauty.
It has almost replaced the word 'mate', often used in Australia to refer to people in a conversation when they can't be bothered trying to remember your name.

Sick Aussie Cunt: Sup cunt?
American feminist: I find that insulting
Sick Aussie Cunt: Piss off
^^^also taken from urbandictionary.com i learned a lot of things i never ever wanted to know from that website

meanderings

2009-05-19T17:08:00.000-07:00

I wonder if trevor wrote this or in fact it was jamie oooh how interesting :)

i see this on the back of buses every day.
Get a famous celebrity to endorse your hair product. Photoshop it to look like she has ten times the amount of hair any real person has.
Looks real enough.
Ignore the fact that said celebrity is a cancer sufferer.
what/?? they have shitloads of hair.

This mundanely named person hit on me whilst i was wearing an over-sized acid wash jacket, a side ponytail and electric blue earrings. stoat. well he gave me this card so i guess its mine now and i can do as i please with the information on it:) can I??

a new aesthetic. pron.

2009-05-19T15:13:00.000-07:00

"Your Brain projects the missing information, then your imagination fills it in and feels the pleasure of participation"- Hideki Ono

After considering that quote i think it could be interesting to work with some images that are less confrontational and leave a lot to the imagination. But the lips collage does leave bits o the imagination!!! w.a.n.panic. shiza. fotze. I was thinking of animating the collages i ave made, or the images and have them looking like stills but with subtle little movements, like those intimate little noises and things you do when you're really relaxed, sleeping for example.
I was reading the latest issue of adbusters yesterday, and decided to go and buy it because i wanted to show people all of the stories, they're very relevant to my work. Or maybe i just agree with everything they say... they had this excerpt in there, i found the original on the website and took a screen shot. Suicide normalized, a boring cliche on the screen but something traumatic and heart breaking in real life. This girl is probably dead now but how will you ever know?
It also featured an article by Dougas Haddow "Pornocalypse Now",
Very insightful. I don't watch porn so was unaware that a man making a girl spew out her nose while performing oral sex then urinating in her mouth and eyes was adult entertainment. It makes me want to spew out my eyes I hope i never see anything like that. ever. If things like that are commonplace on the internet, which is after all FOR porn then whats so bad about saying cunt? When is it acceptable to say that? People freak out if you say vagina it amuses me, best to call it 'down there', and don't say that you're going to the toilet, say 'bathroom' it leaves a little to the imagination.

eew. and the 'mytaxback' man stopped me yesterday in the street.

Have you filled out your tax return
oh you have, actually i think i recognise you, are you at AUT?
oh auckland uni thats right. I do remember your green hat.
how much tax did you get back
thats still something. better than nothing
thats enough to buy another two hats, how much was that hat
ok one hat then
where did you get it
its cold down there, what is your favourite colour
why do you want to know mine
mine are blue white and black
black is very generic, everybody like black, see.
i like blue for my clothing
but i use green for the walls, the carpet, the curtains and the bed sheets
i like green too
you know pantone, the manager of pantone says that blue is the most attractive colour for a male
and pink for a female because it makes your skin glow
do you wear pink
can you write your email address here
ok thank you and what is your phone number
you don't know your phone number?
do you have a boyfriend
i take you out for coffee, i'll be your boyfriend
if i email you dont email me back. no, please do.
have a good day

Alicia Frankovich - A plane for Behavers

2009-05-18T18:47:00.000-07:00

I volunteered at artspace serving drinks for this exhibition. Everyone was nice but it was awkward not knowing anybody so i didn't end up going to the workshop and dinner the next night, i couldn't be bothered with having to reject non vegan food then listen to her talk about her work while i was quietly chewing off my hand. I Don't know what to say about her work, I only saw the performance where she was carried around by people. The people participating looked really stoked and acted like it was hard work carrying her around, "did you have a go?" as if it was a game or an exercise machine, something physically challenging for them. Then later on a man came up to me and asked if i was her
no, not me
yes you are *laughs* so... *art rant*
sorry wrong person, i was just serving the drinks
*ho ho ho* no you werent. so tell me about the suspention performance?
at this point amanda just leaves the building

creating spaces

2009-05-17T17:38:00.000-07:00

"Don't look for the disco ball and laser light show, look for the light on light off"

or put sunglasses on it.I had a talk with tim the other night about things and stuff and life in general. Mostly about how i keep everything, i have so much STUFF and i love it. I like decorating my room and making little personal spaces that i feel comfortable in. It stressed me out so much moving in to a house where i had nothing and we weren't meant to put posters on the wall. I collect lots of little things I like and make them into an interesting bunch of amandaness. yay for me.
My artwork seems to be a bit disjointed, i like only certain parts of it like the hair on the mirror, the lips collage, and a few of the photographs. I like the dampness and wet, the grotesque hair, the references to the body, the bathroom. None of these things stand alone as a work for me so i thought maybe i should apply what I do in my personal spaces to my artwork and create an environment with aspects of all of my little art works. I would like a space like my bedroom or a bathroom, somewhere with more artificial light, darkness, water, dirt, damp, enclosed. Pretty much somewhere unlike my studio which is bright white with sunlight spilling through.

Unrelated junk...
Blu Tac. I went to buy some blu tac to stick all of the doodles to the wall and seriously, what the fuck is blu tac? Its rubbery plasticy shite, probably raping the environment with its production. I never thought about it like that until i calculated my carbon footprint here and found that it will take 1.5 planet earths to sustain my lifestyle... that is quite depressing. What else is interesting... walking to the bus stop and seeing fat little children with arms full of pies and chips for breakfast, or eating an entire packet of squiggle tops. Child abuse! I took my takeaway mocha into the bathroom with me and knocked it onto the floor so it was covered in sludgy brown spalshes like chronic dihorrhea. so gutted. I heart huckabees, why had i not wached that until now? I love the scene with the family that had taken a Sudanese orphan into their home, so funny! and people are so like that...

cutty cutty cutty paste paste paste

2009-05-12T16:09:00.000-07:00

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.

i see myself seeing myself photographing myself... mirrors, vouyers, eeek.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.
inspired by steph saying 'yous are cunts'.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.legs, reflection. love the green hair at the bottom but not much else

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.

California Grunion

2009-05-11T18:39:00.000-07:00

^^^That is my green Porno name. Sounds like i like it rough with a but of grunting and onions. If you don't know what Green Porn is you're missing out BIG time! So strange and so amusing. Isabella Rossellini is one mental bitch.
I love the informal approach she has taken, how humorous it is, her crazy voice and her matter-of-fact way of thrusting and penetrating as if she has always been a praying mantis with a praying mantis penis.
Thats all i have to say until i fully get my head around it. Watch the whale one it is awesome.

Hannah Hoch

2009-05-10T17:42:00.001-07:00

1889-1978
bisexual.. anti war (supplies!), Hannah was the only woman in the in crowd when it came to DADA. May have something to do with sleeping with someone else but thats beside the point, that ended badly with her liking women instead. DOn't screw the crew. Whoever made up that saying is crap at rhyming its like don't pick your nose or do not push this button.
her collages feature women's bodies and ancient artefacts. She sourced pictures from magazines targeted at women and through her work showed awareness of the difference between women in the media and women in reality. Not so hard to make that correlation these days... Look at PSD's i effing love that website! makes me feel a lot better about myself, my photoshop skills, my intelligence AND my appearance.
The work on the left is titled 'Marlene' and was made in 1930. The legs in the air on top of the plinth replace what looks to have bee a phallic column of some sort. There are lips in the top right hand corner oooh lips i use lips newwwssflash relevant relevant. I love the simplicity of her montages, using just a few different images so each has weighted meaning and is carefully considered. I like these much more than the ones that look like a toy box full of random shit, my life looks like that I don't want my art to!

thinking about cutting and pasting and snipper snapping

2009-05-10T16:51:00.000-07:00

Ava Seymour
Madame Postiche 2005

colour photographic print
275 x 225mm

Saw some of her works at a gallery, which one exactly i have no idea but they made an impression on me. I found them highLARIOUS because of the subject matter, location and the way she had put it together. That describes nothing really does it... i just like the mismatched heads and how retarded (so shoot me) they look, LOVE the boobie heads!!

The images she made in 1993, Blood and Guts in Deutschland using black and white cut outs with the only colour coming from pictures of meat and entrails are my favourites. Probably because of the subject matter, they're just so funny though! See them all here on Micheal Lett's website.

Ava Seymour
Who Done It 1993

digital photographic print
1000 x 1460mm

Elements of her work that i want to use to develop my own
stuff
well, the black and white images with only little pieces of colour work well. I like that her collages use very few images and that the images are all carefully considered. By juxtaposing certain images she an make something sexual out of something that is not sexual at all, or something grotesque from something mundane. IMAGINATION.
They seem to be fun and informal, maybe this is because of the collage medium, crafty and all that. I don't know... don't judge me. The remind me so much of Nancy Burson's craniofacial photographs. I think it is just the use of images of deformed people. Both artists have entirely different intents, Burson's is to make the people beautiful whereas Seymour is just being playful. This shows how much effect juxtaposing images with other images has on our reading of the work. State the obvious amanda. I dont like Seymours use of images of disabled people. You can achieve the same effects by cutting and pasting dfferent limbs together to make the body look distorted. Using a disability as a point of interest, fascination is not something I think very highly of. It falls in to the same category as walnut and marmite sandwiches. Growth stunting, horrible tasting, life ruining, bad memoriesdontwanttotalkaboutitanymoregoaway. Here are some words used to describe them, found on these pages
ARTSPACE "retards, cripples and amputees."
PHYSICS ROOM- "creatures"...to much to type just click the link,
I can see why her work is controversial!!!
speaking of disabilities and taking the piss out of minorities, those cadbury comedy billboards taking the piss out of dyslexics weren't funny. None of their ad campaigns were. For fucks sake. Take the piss out of the children you use to get your cocoa now theres something hilarious.

I <3 Marilyn Minter

2009-05-10T16:00:00.000-07:00

"I don’t want to sound disingenuous, but to me it’s not sexy—it’s gorgeous. It’s about hunger and insatiability, a trailer without a movie behind it, an ad only for itself."-Minter

Marilyn Minter on Salon 94
Her work is so full on, beautiful, rich sparkling erotic pretty over the top fun feminine
wow
i love the extreme close ups, she doesn't crop the photos which astounds me she must get RIGHT up in their business to get these shots! The wetness is almost grotesque, dripping, moist, beads of water like sweat or tears. mooooiiiissssttt. moist.
Seeing this makes me want to use more extreme close ups in my work. Minter photographs these things then has her students help her to paint them, so a few of the above pictures are actually paintings, you can tell on the one of the little girl. The moving image works so well, the tongue curling and licking is repulsive and alluring. I think it says a lot more than the painting and photographs and has a greater impact when you first see it although after watching it a few times and reading about it you start to deconstruct it and just see it for what it is.

the lighting, strong shadows vivid colours, the use of reflective and transparent materials, glass, diamond thingees, water, sparkles, bubbles. fucking mint.

www.greenpinkcaviar.com

amazing video! aaaah. ahhhhhh. wow. It looks like seaweed and sea creatures swirling around underneath a glass bottom boat i love the shit out of it!

“This is inappropriate and uncouth. But I can’t stop looking at it, even though it’s not appealing.”

“Is it an ad for gum? It said ‘chewing.’ ”

“I don’t care about any of the fucking shit around it—I like that there’s art in Times Square and want to see more.”

“It’s difficult to see when there’s so much around it.”

KID, POINTING: “What the fuck is that?”
MOM, ANGRILY: “It’s lips.”

“This is sick and horny.”

“In this context it’s grating, almost too shocking. Maybe people’s reactions are part of the art.”

Reactions from people passing by, from nymag.com

"I was shooting stills of models with long tongues swirling and sucking bakery products from under a pane of glass. I wanted to make enamel paintings along the idea of 'painting with my tongue'. My makeup artist shot some short videos during the shoot just to see how it would look. The low definition videos looked so good that we made plans to do a professional high definition video. This made sense to me as I have made both billboards and produced a commercial advertising a painting show in 1989."

- Marilyn Minter

Elam

2009-04-27T17:24:00.000-07:00

I put my film in the drying cupboard, it disappears.
I hire out an HD camera for the week and somebody else takes it. yay. not to worry i'll just film at work its not like i hired it on that particular day for a reason.
Photoshop advanced tutorials consist of using selection tools and masks and talking about printing profiles.
There is no vege caravan. not that there are any vegetarians... maybe i'll start a mums home cooking caravan everyone here lives with their parents.
The keyboards are all filthy brownish grey, no wonder I'm sick. If you're going to have a mac suite for gods sake clean the keyboards it is repulsive. I hope someone gets my cold from them :) never washing my hands again.

Walead Beshty

2009-04-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

The Phenomenology of Shopping (2001-03)
C-prints mounted on plexiglass
18 x 22 in.

Walead Beshty
I'm unsure if this is the artist i was looking for, i wanted the guy that photographed a man with his head inside a washing machine. It was really cool and dealt with phenomenological experience but this guy MUST be that guy because this guyis doing pretty much the same thing I just can't find any information on it.

digital implications

2009-04-27T15:42:00.000-07:00

orange horace camera and phillip the praying mantis

I hadn't though about this until i started using film just yesterday. What a heat rate that was, the film looks under developed and i was using the wrong setting so they're all blurry... contact sheet to come but its pretty nil. When i went to print the digital photos i had taken the computer automatically crops them to fit the page, if it hadn't done this I may not have thought to crop them myself. They look a lot better this way, and the colour is slightly different when printed which for the most part makes them look shit house but sometimes it can bring to light something you hadn't previously thought of. So colour and cropping have a lot to do with the digital medium. Just discovered that my film was a colour black and white or something silly so its needed to be processed in colour chemicals. hurrah. it still has images on it which is cool but i can't print them myself at school, everything will have to be done at a photo place fucking expensive ridiculous shit who uses film... i need to get some black and white film!!!

Feminism

2009-04-26T16:43:00.000-07:00

i hate this subject and I don't know what to say about it for fear of contradicting myself, upsetting someone... whatever. Anyhoo, I hated my gender issues lecture series last year. I can't see that there are any issues, there are none that effect me. In short I did not give a shit. Oh but what about all the women before you that worked so hard to get you where you are today and give you equal opportunities.... the same can be said for anything i.e the computer I'm typing on. Its somebody's lifes work. And why should i feel LUCKY?? relative to what, the women from last century well i don't feel lucky because i can't compare. I do not care. no no no no no. wooooo. In my work i never intended to raise issues around feminism but with my materials and subject matter it couldn't be avoided so I will cover ideas and issues that are relevant to me. me me me me me me m me eme mem eme anemone.
I don't feel suppressed or taken advantage of as a woman, if someone fucks me off they know about it and will die a slow and painful death for being such a stain. I don't want women and men to be equal, they cant be they're not the same thing. give and take...men get all he hard labouring jobs (generally) but women have to give birth... look nice... gender arguments go on forever and branch off in to so many different little arguments so i'll stop now

Lots of kisses!

2009-04-21T20:19:00.000-07:00

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

what can i say... i don't know why i did this, i have no concept and no reason for making this other than this;
the anne noble style hair pic looked like a bearing which is what happens when a ewe is lambing and her insides pop out of her vagina. So... after cutting out all the lips to make a montage they started to look so fleshy and pink and gross and overlapping them seems to make it look more disgusting. yay. I like home-made images and graffitti of genitals i find it very amusing. Everyone is just a tiny bit sick in the head and these reveal that. Tim and Matt found these quite hard to look at yet they draw penises at every opportunity. why do people draw penises everywhere it fascinates me?

Cindy Sherman. lol. roflmao. lmao. lame.

2009-04-21T17:54:00.000-07:00

Untitled Film Still #14 1978

CINDY SHERMAN
I read a few articles about her a month ago and stopped because they were too hard to read, I'm not really use to the language used and the works referenced after not looking at anything analog for such a long time...
I cant remember weather or not i've put this on the blog but I can't seem to find it so here goes...
The Gaze traps the subject, but in the same action the subject tames the Gaze (flashback of second year and thinking that Mischa painted about homosexuality. lol.) Screen, Object Gaze. I see myself seeing myself i LOVE that little line it seems to sum up what i want to do say think i think i just enjoy the paradox.

X is Very useful if your name is Nixie Knox,
It also comes in useful spelling Axe and Extra Fox

For Lacan animals are caught in the gaze of the world; they are only on display here. Humans have access to the symbolic and can manipulate the gaze. When we are children we read things very simply and straight forward because we haven't yet had much sensory experience where we associate one thing with another. For example i look at a car, recognize it's brand, age, and my associated memories with cars of that type etc, a child will just see a car (to be giving a crude example but you get the general gist of it).
Speaking of that I sat next to an American Maori man on the plane that was an expert on Foetal Psychology and good friends with Bruce Lipton. I felt cool knowing who that was and casually mentioning that I went to one of his seminars last month :D can't remember his name but he had met a woman in Invercargill and was going down to see her, that would be why he didn't laugh at my reasons for moving to Auckland... I want to study psychology and philosophy!
the person beside me just told his friend to check out rotten.com. wan. no. no. no. I could compile a list of things NOT to look at online.
this however is a must see
Spoilsbury Tost Boy II
back to Cindy Sherman
I read some of this book
Burton, Joanna Ed. Cindy Sherman. MIT Press, London 2006
I got really sick of this book very quickly, it was a little too concept heavy with no practical examples other than her work and it read too deeply in to it, it looked at everything right down to the finish on the photo be it matte or gloss. I guess that is important but i really don't give a shit that someone thinks the gloss finish is like a mirror then goes in to elaborate detail referencing mirrors through art and time and space and metaphors for life death pansies nature beauty using the most verbose language they can find. fuck.
the thing i do like about her photography the most is that she is using herself, gazing at herself through the lens (but not actually) setting up the frame to capture herself in these frozen moments, 'film stills'. I don't know why they are called this when nothing came before or after the shot in a filming sense but they are a still life shot of her constructed tableau. It makes me think of a mis en scene in a movie even though this isn't that. She constructs our gaze and directs it at herself and that's about where i loose myself and get confused.
The artist has created a method of making the Gaze in alliance with the model. The artist is the model though, she has chosen how she wants to be seen, taken the shots, chosen the best one and presented it to the audience for their voyeuristic pleasure.

She's her own director, she's her own cameraman, I don't know what a best boy is but she's the best boy. She doesn't even have an assistant ... She's just got this table with wigs and so forth and a mirror. When I first met her I asked her 'Why did you stop doing the untitled film stills?' and she just said 'I ran out of clichés'. (Arthur C. Danto, Philosopher and Art Critic)source

Well if she can do it all by herself I can't use that as an excuse for not being able to get the shots I want, It just presents new challenges and new possibilities.

DIscussion

2009-04-21T17:46:00.000-07:00

Playing around trying to make this pic look even more like a pin up ^^^^
Just had a great chat with Laura in my class who seems to be a million times more knowledgeable about photography than myself and she pointed out a few things,
1.My photos are all completely different in colour and lighting, i need to choose the one that works best to get my message across.
2. what exactly is my message???! Its moved so far away from being about animals skin and human skin to being feminist abject self portraits looking at the gaze. *sigh*
3.play around with the images i have, photoshop the shit out of them so that they all look the same if that is what i need, de-saturate, take out all the information that isn't needed in the photos and make them more about my yet to be discovered message of truth and enlightenment. *aaaaaahhhhh ambient enya like music*

The Gaze

2009-04-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

"If a bird were to paint would it not be by letting fall its feathers, a snake by casting off its scales, a tree by letting fall it's leaves? What it amounts to is the first act in the laying down of the gaze" Lacan, J. Four Fundamental Concepts.

It is not conscious descision or will that creates these 'paintings' but something internal/ (physics? laws, hard determinism). The painting is still a reaction to something

I have been reading this book
Bracha L. Ettinger. The Matrixial Gaze. Feminist Arts and Histories Network, Leeds UK, 1995.

It is a little off the topic but i find it so interesting!! I really need to get back in to reading Lacan and Merleau Ponty I forgot how much it made me think and how awesome it is. Feminist literature gives me the shits (can you say that in Auckland?) in other words it scares me. I wonder who the feminist writings are directed at??? moi. moi moi moi.
We look at the Gzae and we are longing for it, desiring to be looked at by it but it is always hidden from us (insert comparison with double slit experiment here). For Lacan every object or absent object is a phallic object, symbolic of the castration process. This was also true for the 'object a' of the Gaze as well.

"You can never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see"-Lacan
I see myself seeing... I have had such horrible dreams lately, one in which my skin was rotting on my face, peeling off like when you drop acid on paint and it bubbles and decays. I also dreamed about zach but he was dead but glowing green and white and I felt so privileged to have seen him. Hmmm,

Just a note, obviously my sentences are lacking in structure and have no grammar and trail off or never finish or pop up in the middle of things BUT this is just a working space for me, not something highly polished :)

Anne Noble

2009-04-20T19:48:00.001-07:00

Anne Noble- Ruby's room 1998-2007
more on ruby's room series here, i HIGHLY recommend looking through all of the pictures to get a better sense of what she is talking about, the significance of time and why the images could be considered sexual.

"Anne Noble has long been acknowledged as a major figure in the evolution of photography in New Zealand, and today she is regarded as one of our most significant mid-career artists....
In a time when so much photography seems conspicuously posed or an artful emulation of the casual snapshot, the dignity, quietude and measured pace of Noble's photographs is strangely arresting and almost always profoundly moving."
Priscilla Pitts, Director, Dunedin Public Art Gallery source

Ruby's room 23

Confronting and provocative, innocence of childhood, experiencing things through the mouth. The reaction of the adult viewer... when so many children have been exploited, exhibitions closed for their seemingly sexual content involving children. What is she trying to say? Is it perverse? Is it art? Art school has art written on the side of it now :P
Noble captures her subjects over time; maternal observation. Looking through the series the photos do somehow become more sexual over time. I think the use of lipstick and fishnets has a huge part to play in that, and the tongue ties up with rubber bands from braces is almost a fetish portrait. Her daughter looks around 2 at the beginning of the series (i have no idea really i don't know how big babies are..), so now she must be in her teens. How wrong. wrong wrong wrong its not cute anymore its pornographic. so confused with why people think things are porno or pedo and what not. These pictures aren't exactly adhering to any beauty ideal and nor is the subject, not that beauty equates to art. faaark.

photo shooting lipstick choking

2009-04-20T17:52:00.000-07:00

This was not to bad... after gagging the first time i manages to take quite a few photos, some are cool but most are boring glamour shots, one liners. My favourite is the one that is blatantly Anne noble. It looks better turned on its side. I think i will make a montage of lips
i want to be in a magaziiine....
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
Dopey looking
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
munch munch
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
subtle but lame
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
hairy monster fanny a la tommy brough
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
nom nom
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
loving desaturation at the moment
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

peeehotograffy

2009-04-18T00:25:00.000-07:00

this is another reason why i hate photography. I'm so over point and soot point and shoot. Everything is photoshopped to the point where you can't tell if something is real or not or if it in face uses any photography skills. LAME! It's not an art any more!
p.s im about to spend 1800 on a camera

another year goes by

2009-04-16T19:46:00.001-07:00

1990-2008

ok i have to get a few things out there before i can think straight
I LOVE SUSAN BOYLE
that video stoked me out so much on so many levels and i've watched it 8 times today. shhh.
So i had a go at putting an idea in to action with photographing hair coming out of my mouth. I wanted it to be wet so tried to do this in the bath. not working amanda, cameras do not swim. So i sat and choked on a hairball until my eyes watered and let the water drain from the bath while my camera sat lazily on the tripod getting moist. Cameras also are not a fan of moisting although this camera has had many a moisting in many different ways. photos to come... but they are all crap. I really need underwater casing for my camera, or a new camera, or someone to HELP ME!!! tim come home :( xx

Valie Export

2009-04-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

Confronting Voyeurs with a body that returns the Gaze
Aktionshose : Genitalpanik 1969- Performed at a Cinema in Munich
Wearing crotchless pants and weilding a machine gun, wouldn't you be stoked if this creature stormed in to the middle of your porno?

Tapp und Taskino 1968
The curtain rises for your hands, welcoming your touch rather than your gaze. Private show people, 30seconds each and when times up I'll just start staring at you... A bit awkward, being a public place and boob groping is going on. Export just looks at her watch while the action takes place, waiting for it to be over. It makes me think of peoples stories of sex, tired of it and wanting the other person to hurry up... Breaking taboos, sexual acts in public places.
To me the box seems like a child's version of a cinema, children can create anything out of a box. It is quite informal, crafty in its use of materials.

the first step

2009-04-16T00:49:00.000-07:00

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.I had a dream last night that Candice was carefully sewing little pieces of paper onto my finger tips using shiny red cotton. It hurt like fuck but i had to get it finished. Now i want to know what it feels like

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

SLACK!

2009-04-15T18:22:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

So i haven't written on here in over two weeks, doesn't mean I have been up to fucks. i swear. I lost my precious notebook with all my notes in it about life and art but it is currently in the post on its way back to me (i hope) :(
I Watched Zeitgeist the other day, can't remember if i mentioned that already but its a poorly made film with extreme ideas. Interesting none the less but not really anything to rave about. The thing that most interested me was the whole Jesus phenomenon. I was all like WOAH after watching it but quickly settled back into normal life and mundane thoughts within a day. Amanda doesn;t care enough... maybe because its such a negative film, tell me something fun i can do to make change not something shit that I have overlooked and... and... ?
I did a photo shoot thismorning, i like the pictures but will still see if i can improve them in photoshop. There is boobage and ts embarassing but i think it looks nice so shush.

Vanessa Beecroft

2009-03-30T19:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-27T03:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-27T01:00:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-03-26T16:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-26T15:04:00.000-07:00

creative commons licence

Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand

Wim Delvoye

2009-03-24T14:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-23T19:34:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-23T18:41:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-23T16:39:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-23T01:40:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-17T16:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-17T16:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-16T02:46:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-03-16T02:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-15T01:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-14T23:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-14T23:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-14T20:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-08T11:52:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-08T03:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-08T01:01:00.001-08:00

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.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,;;;;;;;;;;;222222222222222222''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

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

2009-03-07T11:55:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-06T22:52:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-06T21:11:00.000-08:00

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

Ann Hamilton TRON

2009-03-06T20:48:00.000-08:00

"You have to trust the things you can't name"
"you feel through your body, you take in the world through your skin."

Hamilton explores communication and sensory perception, and believes experience leads to knowledge, the way your senses interact with the world around you to form your opinions, your phenomenologicalexperience of the world around you. Hamilton is interested in the relationship between animals and humans, in her 1996 exhibition 'voce' visitors were invited to wear headsets that played birdsong and mimic what they heard. Birdsong is impossible to perfectly imitate using your own voice making the human version inadequate and longing for a perfection that they can never achieve without external aid.

Tropos uses bundles of horse hair to cover the entire floor of the room. Horse hair is still used in the production of wigs so has associations with both animals and humans. You are drawn to it because of its human resemblence but repelled with associations of animal cruelty and exploitation, and question the ethical treatment of the horses whose hair is used in the exhibition. The sheer amount of hair used and it's placement in an industrial building speaks about the mass scale on which animals are alughtered and used for our purposes and commoditised. Her work really brings to attention the the mass sacrifice of animals for human aesthetics, which is something I want to concentrate on within my own work.

Mona Hatoum

2009-03-06T20:07:00.000-08:00

"Keffieh," by Mona Hatoum, (1993-99), human hair on cotton, 1993-1999, collection Peter Norton, Santa Monica

Mona Hatoum uses Human hair as well as images and footage of her own body in her work. In the above piece she has interwoven pieces of women's hair into a traditional Arab head scarf worn only by males. Issues of gender and suppression surround this piece. There is something beautiful and at the same time grotesque about wearing the hair of another human as decoration and I find this ibject quite unsettling and repulsive. The use of hair makes the work quite intimate and is a familiar thing as we all have it although it shifts to being uncomfortable when taken out of context and removed from our bodies.

"The macho style is an externalized response to the powers of domination; but it is also a form of domination turned inward, within the community poised against the presence of women, whose voices are either repressed, or sublimated in the cause of struggle. Hatoum's feminized headscarf reveals this disavowal of the place of women and re-inserts their point of view through the embroidered strands of hair that hang loose beyond the boundary, breaking the pictorial grid of the material in the process of redefining the symbolic surface of political struggle." source

A series of etchings called 'Hair, there and everywhere' are collections of hair which look as though some have been arranged into patterns and others just laid there. You can make out images yourself and imagine what creatres could be hiding amongst the interweaving curling lines but you can't quite tell if she had intentionally made images amongst the hair.This work is very intense and involves a lot of human hair, I would love to know who it belonged to and how she obtained it because this has a lot of implications. I likt to think that it is her own, that in a way she suffered for her art and what she believes in, putting a part of herself into the work. This seems to have been the case with previous works such as 'Corps étranger' (1994) or ‘Deep Throat’ (1996), installations that use endoscopic journies through the interior landscape of the artist’s own body. This work also used leather and beeswax, materials from animals in conjunction with human derived material. The leather is durable, the human hair seems fragile, not holding the suitcases together, awkwardly fumbling across the gap.This work 'Van Gogh's Back' (1995) is very light hearted and fun. It reminds me of playing in the bath with shampoo in my hair and making fun shapes. I love her different uses of hair and the Human body, all of them have vastly different effects on me wether that be repulsion, fascination or just very thought provoking.

DAY I

2009-03-02T00:18:00.000-08:00

First day at Elam.
New school, new people, new lecturers, new cafe that burns my soy milk. Coolies.
Project one requires that we create two works of art by next monday to present in our space (if you can call thirteen people in a room space). A smaller space brings about a new set of confinements and implications to work with so can be quite exciting. Lots of room for interaction within the room, high ceilings, grey floors that are almost the right colour to project on to. I think i will use this short project as a social experiment to get an idea of people's feelings and reactions towards the materials I plan to experiment with.
I want to explore skin, people's skin, animal skin, leather, fur, shedding skin and hair-waste, reactions to all of these materials and how they are revered/ repulsive. I am interested in how we use leather so carelessly without really a thought to where it has come from, yet we are so precious when it comes to our own skin, not wanting to burn or scar it, wanting perfection.
Tattoos and scarification do not fit the beauty norm as plastic sugery does even though sugery is far more extreme, body mods such as piercings and large tattoos are considered more extreme. WELL theyre not.
I want to use materials from humans, and my first thought was to use some of my hair. Combing my fingers through my hair a lot of it falls out. It's gross unless it's still attached to your scalp, nobody likes stray hairs! It reminds me a lot of Mona Hatoum's works, she uses both internal and external elements involving human hair and images and recordings of her internal organs.