The artist’s enormous technicolour works of styrofoam, acrylic and and plastic create surreal dreamscapes in galleries and street corners. In One Floor Up More Highly, jagged shards of crystal styrofoam emerge from hillocks and boulders of dyed soil. In Atoms Inside Balloons, enormous latex balls float and dangle from the ceiling, while Faux Rocks features globular marbles of styrofoam that seem suspended in mid-bounce.
Her work investigates the intersection between gallery and street art, performance and installation, graffiti and abstract expressionism, putting the viewer in the centre of the work.
Two Younger Women Come In and Pull Out a Table will be at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg from 16 February to 9 June.
Designed by La Boca, the Lucifer Jacket is a homage to the satin jacket featured in Kenneth Anger’s 1972 film Lucifer Rising, and will only be produced as a very limited edition (less than 100) available from today at Sixpack France online store.
For those who are not fans of The Shining, Room 237 may not appear to be your kind of film, but look past the subject of its analysis and you still have an interesting and subversive documentary. Rodney Ascher’s adoration and enchantment of Kubrick’s classic horror film led him to find out more about the film and through that journey he stumbled upon a realm of exhaustive, subjective theories relating to it. In this new documentary several of these ideas are analysed in great depth and with tremendous vivacity thanks to Ascher’s direction.
Some of the theories seem relatively crack-pot when first spoken about but as the film etches through each hypothesis and every point of reference, they begin to take illustrious shape. Whether or not you agree with beliefs that The Shining pointed to notions such as Kubrick filming the 1969 Moon landing, the genocide of the Native Americans or the machinations of Hitler’s exterminations of the Jews, the theorists always give an interesting lecture on why they believe it to be so.
For film students, critics and fanatics, this is a ground-breaking documentary about the debates and discussions of film. Especially for the film studies faction, Room 237 proves the worth of analysis in a director, star or genre. Not many know of the degrees of detail in which people read into films and Room 237 is an expert example of showing some cinema-goers’ unique perceptions. As dense at it may be at points, the film runs through the bunch of theories, always with more than one astounding examination. Furthermore, Ascher uses snippets from various horror films to envision some of the interviewee’s stories (many clips of people in cinemas corresponding with theorist X talking about their first experience of The Shining, for example), thus alleviating some of the blandness that comes from only hearing the voices of the Shining enthusiasts.
It will not be to everyone’s taste and its commercial-fate may not be up to par with the regular Hollywood releases, but even with the slightest bit of success (no doubt it will surpass what might be expected of it) it could easily become the start of a new trend in film-orientated documentary filmmaking. Ascher and producer Tim Kirk have already noted in interviews the wealth of study with the films of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky (to which any film fan could add on an array of other directorial names) and so the opportunity to do what Ascher and Kirk have done is excitingly open. Room 237 is an eye-opening film, not only for The Shining, but for what it means to perceive film; easily one of the finest celebrations of cinema – and with having just explored one example in the plethora of movie history.
Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962 focuses on one of the most significant developments in contemporary abstract painting: the artist’s literal assault on the picture plane. Responding to the physical and psychological destruction wrought by World War II—especially the existential crisis resulting from the atomic bomb—artists ripped, cut, burned, and affixed objects to the canvas in lieu of paint. Destroy the Picture emphasizes this internationally shared artistic sensibility in the context of devastating global change and dynamic artistic dialogues, offering an innovative and expansive view of art making in the postwar period.
As artists from war-torn countries like Italy and Japan—including Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Kazuo Shiraga, and Shozo Shimamoto—channeled their ruined surroundings into artistic form, artists throughout the world—such as Yves Klein and Niki de Saint Phalle in France, John Latham in the United Kingdom, Robert Rauschenberg and Lee Bontecou in the United States, Otto Müehl in Austria, and Manolo Millares in Spain, among others—pursued similar approaches and strategies. Destroy the Picture presents an opportunity to reconsider the profound repercussions of this remarkably coherent approach in painting, from artists’ early experiments with translating gestures into materials to their emphasis on a rupture between two and three dimensions, as well as the expansion of the painting medium to incorporate performance, assemblage, and time-based strategies. In many cases, the exhibition places the work of now-established artists back into the radical context in which it originally emerged.
Destroy the Picture features approximately 100 works created between 1949 and 1962 by artists from eight countries, including Lee Bontecou, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Salvatore Scarpitta, and Kazuo Shiraga, in addition to Gérard Deschamps, François Dufrêne, Jean Fautrier, Adolf Frohner, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, John Latham, Gustav Metzger, Otto Müehl, Manolo Millares, Saburo Murakami, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, Shozo Shimamoto, Antoni Tàpies, Chiyu Uemae, Jacques Villeglé, Wolf Vostell, and Michio Yoshihara.
Have you ever just wished you could lift your pen off the paper and see your drawing become a real three dimensional object?
3Doodler is the world’s first 3D Printing Pen. Using ABS plastic (the material used by many 3D printers), 3Doodler draws in the air or on surfaces. It’s compact and easy to use, and requires no software or computers. You just plug it into a power socket and can start drawing anything within minutes. Oh, and it’s also the most affordable way to 3D print… by a looong way!
As 3Doodler draws, it extrudes heated plastic, which quickly cools and solidifies into a strong stable structure. This allows you to build an infinite variety of shapes and items with ease! Most people will instantly be able to trace objects on paper, and after only a few hours of practice you will be able to make far more intricate objects.
Check out 3Doodler: The World’s First 3D Printing Pen on their Kickstarter page.
Glitch video/GIF artist Max Capacity work pushes the grainy VHS cut-ups and early home computer bit constraints of 1980s cyberpunk into the digital realm. Network Awesome and Radosaur Productions interviewed him for Tumblr’s Storyboard effort. “Max Capacity: Net Necromancer”
We love the work of artist Max Capacity. I will venture here to say that his animated GIFs are postmodern, combining in them glitch art, pixel art, movies and stuff I cannot even start to describe. The fact that he uses the name Max Capacity is probably not a coincidence as he has a lot of work to show up for. I can spend hours jumping from his Flickr site to his Tumblr site to his YouTube channel checking out his universe of prolific creation. You have to visit Max Capacity’s sites.
This clip is a very early, full-color Kodachrome film made by Kodak in 1922 to test new film stock and color processing. It is a lovely little four-and-a-half minutes of pretty actresses gesturing for the camera. The color and lighting are exquisite—all warm reds with flattering highlights—making it a purely enjoyable thing to watch.
In 1922, for all its technical achievements, Kodak hadn’t yet done away with the flicker that gave movies one of their earliest and most enduring nicknames: the “flicks.” The flicker resulted from variations in film speed produced by the slow, hand-cranked cameras of the time and by variations in the density of the film itself.
Even more interesting to a modern viewer are the women’s gestures. They act out fluttery, innocent modesty; warm maternal love; and in the longest sequence, sexy, puckered-lip vamping. Their open expressions of feeling and the particular way they move their hands and tilt their heads, even more than the fashions of their clothes and makeup, immediately mark them as women of the interwar period. Recently a Russian film scholar, Oksana Bulgakowa, has shown how various feelings and meanings were coded in the gestures of early film actors. Some of these are so unfamiliar now, they seem like a foreign language.
Today, when we watch a TV show or a movie, we see a wide range of acting styles and behaviors. A hundred years from now, which ones will be seen as defining our age?
“Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.”
“…This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of “noise-sound” conquered.”
“… I am not a musician, I have therefore no acoustical predilictions, nor any works to defend. I am a Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything. And so, bolder than a professional musician could be, unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and possibilities open up to daring, I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises.”
“Here are the 6 families of noises of the Futurist orchestra which we will soon set in motion mechanically:
Noises obtained by percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, tarracotta, etc.
Voices of animals and men:
Shouts
Screams
Groans
Shrieks
Howls
Laughs
Weezes
Sobs”
These are all quotations from Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto The Art of Noises (L’arte dei Rumori). Luigi Russolo — painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement– was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. Creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music.
He developed new instruments called intonarumori (‘noise-intoners’) to replicate the booms, hissing and buzzing of the machine age. He brought his controversial performances to London in 1914 and these expanded to major concerts in the 1920s. Russolo spent an increasing amount of time in Paris during this decade, perfecting and inventing other instruments. These included the Russolofono, a keyboard capable of combining the sounds of individual intonarumori. Between 1931 and 1933 Russolo studied occult philosophy in Spain.
Russolo’s interest in the occult was a leitmotif for his life and a foundation for his art of noises. Russolo’s aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the intonarumori, were intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual consciousness. Russolo was a multifaceted man in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace of the irrational.
Using his own devices, Russolo gave concerts in Europe’s largest cities, at times incorporating traditional orchestral instruments. For the most part the response to his music and inventions was violent. Many Avant-garde composers, all modern industrial bands, noise bands, etc., are in some way indebted to Russolo and his futurist visions emanated from the occult. Listen below to an example of Russolo’s music.
WEDNESDAY 2/20/2013 10pm-4am WIERD is proud to present a live performance by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Aaron Dilloway With DJs Anarexia, Tesco Jane, Frankie Teardrop Home Sweet Home 131 Chrystie St. @ Delancey NY
Aaron Dilloway has been releasing and recording music since the age of 16. He was a member of experimental bands Couch, Galen and Universal Indians. He is a former guitarist and tape manipulator for the experimental band Wolf Eyes, which he left in 2005 to live most of that year in Kathmandu, Nepal. While his wife did her graduate work there, he roamed the streets recording every sound he could, many of which are used in his recent recordings and performances.
Currently he runs the noise record label, record store and mailorder Hanson Records, which he began in Brighton, Michigan in 1994. Hanson then moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan for several years, before finally settling in Oberlin, Ohio, after a brief return to Ann Arbor. He performs solo using eight track tapes and vocal sounds, and records modular synthesizer music as Spine Scavenger. Recently, he has played with an ever-changing cast of sound artists under the name The Nevari Butchers. — hansonrecords.net/
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (b. Neil Megson) is a musician and artist whose career began in Hull, England in 1969. She was a founding member of the hugely influential bands Throbbing Gristle (founders of Industrial music) and Psychic TV.
In 1993, P-Orridge began the art/life project of becoming a single pandrogynous entity along with her (now late) wife Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. — genesisbreyerporridge.com
These are all quotations from Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto 
