Entries Tagged 'Art' ↓

Siberian-born Marina Bychkova’s immaculate Enchanted Dolls wield world-weary attitude, bristling sexuality, fully fleshed-out backstories, and better clothes than you.

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Testicles, from the series Body of Love,
Lambda print, 40×28 in., 2002-2005, by Sheffy Bleier

Meat After Meat Joy, at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York City (511 W. 25th St.), “brings together the work of contemporary artists who use meat in their work (raw meat, the concept of meat, its symbolism and viscera) in order to investigate the paradoxical relationship meat has to the body.”

From Sheffy Bleier’s photo of bull’s testicles, above, to Zhang Huan’s beef muscle suit, right, to Simone Rachell’s wax paper sculpture of a toilet made of meat, it’s a show you can intellectually, ahem, sink your teeth into…or, then again, harshly protest with 30 of your closest vegan comrades. Through Nov. 15; daneyalmahmood.com.

[via BoingBoing]

James Cauty was half of The KLF, the 1990s duo who, backed by a collective of dancers, vocalists, and other artists, lit up dance floors with “3 a.m. Eternal” and “Justified & Ancient,” featuring country great Tammy Wynette.

Now, he and his 15-year-old offspring, Harry, under the name J. Cauty & Son, are making a new kind of art: Sculptures, limited-edition prints, and a film short, “Splatter,” pushing popular cartoon violence to its blood-soaked maximum. The five-foot resin Aim Point, above, for example, shows Tom, of Tom & Jerry fame, finally bringing their popular cat-and-mouse act to a brutal end.

U.K. anti-crime nonprofit Mothers Against Violence called Cauty & Son’s exhibition at London art gallery Aquarium L-13 “sick.” To my ears, that’s a rave review.

[via BoingBoing]

Sike. They’re actually just clay molds for Madam Tussauds Wax Museum‘s upcoming sculpts of the two politicos. Relax.

It almost goes without saying that Shepard Fairey’s posterized image of Barack Obama, below right, is the definitive graphic of the candidate’s campaign. This is saying a lot, in a contest long overflowing with visual irony, metaphor, allusion, and symbology.

This hasn’t, in any way, however, halted the creation of—as I write this—dozens upon dozens of parody poster images. There are at least eighty-nine (89!) at Rene Wanner’s Poster Page, including the Bob Hope jab, above. Plus, many more can be found elsewhere on the web; for example, the slightly creepy, They Live!-ish Believe poster, below, and a sampling of others, beneath.

Enjoy, and don’t forget to vote!

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What you see, above—an Italian 4-fogli, or four-sheet, for the 1973 film, Coffy—is, for its subject, size, and graphical power, to me, the single most desirable ephemeral object in all of Black film, and possibly connected to any movie.

Why?

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Affianwan, Calabar South, Nigeria, 2005 (Photo by Phyllis Galembo)

Photographer Phyllis Galembo burrows deep into what she calls “the transformative power of costume and ritual” by shooting large-format chromes of revelers and worshippers in remote parts of Nigeria, Haiti, and other Caribbean and African countries.

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Carter Wiseman is president of the MacDowell Colony, in Peterborough NH, and teaches at the Yale School of Architecture. In June of 2007, I hosted him on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION.

On the program, he spoke about two of his great passions: The Colony, and architect Louis Kahn, both on which he’d just finished books: Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style: A Life in Architecture, and A Place for the Arts: The MacDowell Colony, 1907-2007. (Kahn’s Philip Exeter Academy library, above, is, like Mac Dowell, in New Hampshire. It is his sole New England work.)

Kahn has long thrilled me, his buildings seemingly arising from undiluted conception. As a Mac Dowell fellow with a perverse interest in architecture—I spent April and May of 2005 there, working my ever-slowly progressing book on architecture in computer and video games—I was deeply and profoundly supported while answering the questions that necessarily bedevil creative work.

I had a wonderful time speaking with Carter Wiseman, a gentle and great mind. You can hear him by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.

I bought MAD magazine‘s hilarious Barack Obama parody on sight yesterday, only $4.99 cheap! HuffPo ran the story, but my question is the same one I had when I saw the hacked artwork documenting Obama’s illegal wiretaps vote: Who’s gonna try swingin’ a placard-sized version of this at the Democratic National Convention, next month?

Few Americans, perhaps, understand how massive a medium comic books became after World War II. At their peak, retailers were moving $80-100 million worth of them per week. Plus, they were hugely influential: With a typical issue passed around between six to ten readers, comics were consumed by more people than the number of adults taking in movies, magazines, radio, or TV.

However, fewer of us, even more, understand how frantic the nation became when the medium went completely pulp, highlighting tales of noir crime and horror, like the infamous EC comic cover, above. With the enormous popularity of these criminal, murderous tales, comics were blamed for everything from truancy to homicide.

So argues David Hadju, in his new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Hadju is my guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, August 15, 2 pm ET.

You can hear his ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.