August 2010
54 posts
“Let’s take for example the notion of interdisciplinarity, which is being widely...”
– An interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha and Genevieve Shiffrar. i’m printing this out and putting it on my bedroom wall. (via so-treu)
The Psychology of Nature | Wired Science |... →
Here’s a direct stream of the link I just...
Listen to Poor Baby Bree Sing "The Bowery" →
For those of us who adore all things 1920s…..
The rise and fall of quicksand. - By Daniel Engber... →
One of the coolest things I’ve read today: A cultural history of quicksand. Also - never knew there were quicksand fetishists out there, although I suppose I should have.
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Chicago Boundaries - radicalcartography →
“Any city-dweller knows that most neighborhoods don’t have stark boundaries. Yet on maps, neighborhoods are almost always drawn as perfectly bounded areas, miniature territorial states of ethnicity or class. This is especially true for Chicago, where the delimitation of Chicago’s official “community areas” in the 1920s was one of the hallmarks of the famous Chicago School...
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Hundreds vie for chance to spend month in museum... →
I didn’t know about this contest before now…I LOVE this idea…win a month-long, live-in stay at the Museum of Science and Industry! Like something from the mixed-up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, no?
“More than 1,500 people from all 50 states and more distant places including Antarctica and Australia applied to spend a Month at the Museum, an immersion experience...
Illustrator Bob Peak
Ignore the offensive “primitive Indian” caption please. The point is, Bob Peak was cool. We have some Bob Peak sketches in our house—drawings made for the film Modesty Blaise, I think. Chicks with guns, that kind of stuff. We’ve always really liked them.
10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books - The... →
A fascinating article, and a really interesting proposition: electronic media doesn’t signal a new paradigm in how we read - just an expansion and continuation of the present one. This is going straight to my Instapaper for slower consideration later….(ha ha).
“My favorite reading revolution, though, isn’t very famous, even though it was conceived by the very famous...
Green Infrastructure and Wild Places—Through... →
“One of the great things about living in Chicago is how green it is. Literally. Every spring I’m always amazed by the proliferation of gardens, pocket parks, and major green spaces in the city. And many of these gardens are invisible to most us, as they exist behind row houses or, more typically, on tops of office buildings.
NRDC has long been an advocate for these kind spaces, in...
Artworld Salon » Blog Archive » Artoon →
I would change #3 to say, “become a freelance arts writer.” JUST KIDDING.
Center Field | Frances Whitehead, Embedded Artist →
My latest post for Bad at Sports on art:21 blog just went live. An excerpt:
What do artists know? A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon at the Chicago home of Frances Whitehead talking about the philosophical and pragmatic underpinnings of this question. To be sure, the notion that artists have a specialized knowledge — a quantifiable skill set of processes, methodologies, and...
Episode 260: When I’m Five : Bad at Sports →
New Bad at Sports podcast is up!
An entry point to Amanda Ross-Ho's art -... →
“What emerges most strikingly in both the work itself and Ross-Ho’s articulate discussion of it is a kind of artistic holism, an insistence on the acknowledgment and exploration of all aspects of the system, often to the detriment — indeed, the downright abandonment — of the traditionally hallowed fine art object. One begins to have a sense of the work less as a sequence of...
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the titling on this is f%^&ed up!!
I found the guy who does songsaboutbuildingandfood again, after losing touch with the website’s RSS (don’t ask me how). The image below doesn’t show up in my “like” column, so I’m reblogging it instead. I love everything on this site.
firmuhment:
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Hot Chick at the Art Institute
Seriously, I can’t get enough of this woman. Who was she? The title of Ralph Elmer Clarkson’s 1912 painting is “Nouvart Dzeron, a Daughter of Armenia.” She is currently on view at The Art Institute (the painting is part of their permanent collection), and when I was there last week I stared at this painting for…well, a long time, given that I was with other people....
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Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm, Ottawa, IL →
Woo Hoo! We pick up our first share this morning! Can’t wait to taste it all! (NSFVegetarians).
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Design Philosophy Politics » Frances Whitehead... →
“Frances Whitehead discusses projects that blur the boundaries between conceptual art, design, planning and architecture, including her multi-faceted, sustainably designed studio and dwelling created from the bones of a former Chicago industrial building.”
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The Living Moss Bath Mat - Shelterpop →
“How refreshing would it be to step out of a solar-heated shower onto an organic, sustainable bath mat that’s actually alive? That’s the idea behind designer Nguyen La Chanh’s Moss Carpet. This bath mat is actually a nursery for three varieties of living moss: ball mass, island moss and forest moss — all watered by the condensation in your bathroom and the...
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“Here’s another story, not as funny. The subject of writers had come up....”
– Fallen Princess (aka Christina Kelly, who was once the features editor of Sassy magazine).
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Burn, Baby, Burn: Furries Join Baby Ikki on a... →
Oh yeah…furries. A report on L.A. artist Marnie Weber’s performance installation which instructed visitors “to offer our fuzzy bodies up to guests for hugs, pets, and dances, but ‘nothing sexual.’”
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In Praise of Fast Food - Utne Reader →
“If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee,...
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Episode 259: Aaron Johnson and Ryan Schneider :... →
Check out the latest podcast on Bad at Sports!!
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Gen Y lifestyle no longer covets ‘material... →
The proverbial ‘laughed so hard I peed a little’ applicable here. :
hipsterrunoff:
Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10928032
Just read some ‘blog article’ that is trying to be ‘culturally insightful’ about how young people no longer care about material…
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Imagination station →
I like how these folks in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood aren’t calling themselves artists. They’re just trying to get shit done without getting all pretentious about it.
“Imagination Station of Roosevelt Park is a nonprofit whose first job is to clean up 2236 and 2230 14th street, two blighted structures on the park facing the epic ruins of Michigan Central...
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Safe Cuddling by Helge Fischer - dezeen →
This is funny and awful at the same time:
“This fluffy children’s playsuit by Royal College of Art graduate Helge Fischer sounds an alarm if the child is touched inappropriately. Called Safe Cuddling, the garment emits flashing lights and alarm bells with escalating intensity if the wearer is touched for too long or in inappropriate places.”
Rant of the Week (and maybe the Decade) →
Powhida on Work of Art.
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Ben Davis on social media art - artnet Magazine →
Jesus Christ could this article be any longer? I like the snarky Ben Davis though, and one of his opening quotes hits the mark:
“On the one hand, this faddish obsession with “social media” is understandable. The Facebook Corp. has begun to wrap its fingers around every other aspect of life, so it is clearly logical to ask what effects social media might have on art-making....
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Ludic Despair: The Biograph Potlatch →
“I gained further insight into the folly of directorial fetishism this week after finally catching up with Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009) on cable. I thought the film itself was okay, pretty good actually. I didn’t feel like I had witnessed the great American parable of violence and justice it seemed to be going for, but on the other hand it kept moving and Depp is always...
Gallery 400 UIC Blog: “…practice always obliges... →
A beautifully written and thoughtful essay by Gallery 400 associate director Anthony Elms:
“Of course, mistakes will happen this way, as will the anxiety of fast-approaching deadlines and work yet to be completed. What makes an exhibition or an artwork something special though is the “shot in the dark” of which no one needs to be informed. English as a language is a mess, structurally...
A brief trip with Caveh Zahedi. « grippingly... →
An interview with the filmmaker featured in “The Holy Moment” segment of Richard Linklater’s film Waking Life.
“It has always seemed to me that being “evolved” would mean being happy and content and fascinated no matter how mundane the external circumstances of one’s life. In that sense, I think that the mundane can be a real teaching tool, in much the same way that the...
What is American Power? - we make money not art →
“In American Power, Mitch Epstein explores and questions the ‘power’ that lays at the core of the United States. ‘Power’ in this case stands for both strength and energy. Over the course of 5 years he traveled through 25 states to photograph nuclear reactors, oil refineries, mines, rigs, abandoned gas pumps, wind parks, pipelines as well as their...
Sara Schnadt: Network, Domestic Intervention →
What I’m hoping to check out this Saturday, August 21st. I missed the opening of this show, which takes advantage of Tom Burtonwood and Holly Holmes’ willingness to engage with the art that they show in their home. This is what I like about What It Is — the artist/curator/dwellers feature work that engage with the specificities of their particular home/space, so that the act of...
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Crafting Fictional Personas With the Language of... →
“In the dark, medieval days before the Internet, teenagers were forced to scribble their stagiest experiments in self-hood in journals and notebooks, or to express themselves through their clothes. The high drama was the same, the amped-up, overstated processing of life the same, but the media available were inferior. How amazing to be able to tell your 1,344 closest friends, “guess...
The Mobile Garden | AREA Chicago →
“Chicago is a green city in comparison to many, but it still faces problems. The Mobile Garden (themobilegarden.org) addresses urban stewardship with an art installation of a native plant garden onto an open-air flat car of the CTA. The idea is that the installation will encourage discourse on urban stewardship, public art, and sustainable materials. The CTA has approved the project to...
Mullican, Mullican – Paper Monument →
“Mullican has taken the idea of a post-studio practice a step further, to examine what a post-artist practice would look like. This poses a healthy challenge for the viewer. How do we approach an artwork if the artist has no connection to a community—or even to a real pathology? On what basis do we interpret it, if its maker is ultimately unknown and unknowable? That Person is neither...
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Caring for Your Online Introvert | Tomorrow Museum →
Oh how I love the way Joanne McNeil writes. And what she writes about. This piece she’s written on “caring for your online introvert” describes the ambivalence I feel about online existence and social media with a precision I find both eerie and comforting.
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Morbid Anatomy: Evan Michelson of Obscura Antiques... →
“If you missed it the first time, or were made curious enough [sic] about the topic to want to know more, do yourself the favor of heading down to Coney to hear Evan wax poetic [sic] in a new and expanded discussion of “the continuing appeal of curated chaos in the home.” Someone please put this lecture on YouTube.
“Flotsam’s Wonder World” by Mike Shine →
I really wish I was going to be in SF during the run of this - it looks fantastic.
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How beautiful ugliness is. →
A group exhibition of works exploring the concept of ugliness. From what I can tell though, the show’s concept doesn’t question or deconstruct the binary of beauty/ugliness in itself.
Pizzas for the People →
Via Groundswell.
A Masterpiece of Nature? Yuck! - NYTimes.com →
What constitutes Ugliness? It’s a question I’ve been thinking (and reading) a lot about lately. NYT science writer Natlie Angier writes on why we see some animals as cute and others as ugly. Check out the hairless cat in the accompanying slideshow. Don’t tell me that’s not cute!
The New Inquiry - children are our future:... →
“Kids must be trained to view the Web as a site for immaterial labor and for anxious self-production…They have not yet become aware of themselves as a brand. “
The Web Means the End of Forgetting - NYTimes.com →
Yes, we’ve heard all this before, but this article by Jeffrey Rosen is still really interesting:
“We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public —...
