Age article. Time magazine article (!). Flickr set of Craig’s work.
It soon emerged that Craig is actually a ripoff of Chris, aka New Yorker Todd Lamb.
But I still like Craig better (and not just because he’s local).
realityhacking.com
Link.
Blurb:
By taking a perspective usually limited to looking at art in the museum to the everyday world I interact with existing public situations. The consequences of these encounters are interventions or temporary installations which are often abandoned. In this process the artist subjugates himself to the act of perception by being anonymous.
Yes.
Yayoi Kusama
From Wikipedia:
Kusama has experienced hallucinations and severe obsessive thoughts since childhood, often of a suicidal nature. She claims that as a small child she suffered severe physical abuse by her mother.
Early in Kusama’s career, she began covering surfaces (walls, floors, canvases, and later, household objects and naked assistants) with the polka dots that would become a trademark of her work. The vast fields of polka dots, or “infinity nets,” as she called them, were taken directly from her hallucinations.
She left her native country at the age of 27 for New York City, after years of correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe in which she became interested in joining the limelight in the city. During her time in the U.S., she quickly established her reputation as a leader in the avant-garde movement. She organized outlandish happenings in conspicuous spots like Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, often involving nudity and designed to protest the Vietnam War. She was enormously productive, but did not profit financially from her work. She returned to Japan in ill health in 1973.
Today she lives, by choice, in a mental hospital in Tokyo, where she has continued to produce work since the mid-1970s. Her studio is a short distance from the hospital. “If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago,” Kusama is often quoted as saying.
Interlude: Wither Art
Well, despite a surprisingly effortless and ostensibly quite successful interview, I didn’t get into VCA. Stranger Of The Month aren’t returning my calls. Rob Hely asked me to help him with a project of his, but I think he’s decided he doesn’t like me any more. (He called me a manipulative psychopath, which was so funny it was almost worth alienating him for.) Beloved Freakley has moved to Perth and dedicated herself to talking in quotes absolutely all of the time. I admire her commitment, but our conversations just aren’t the same somehow.
It’s hard not to go “Well, The Legitimate Art World, I did my best to be your friend but at the end of the day you just couldn’t love me for me.” Or maybe it’s the other way around. Who knows.
So what now? Maybe I’ll do this course. Maybe I’ll do a part-time course at PSC. Although I’m primarily interested in more conceptual forms of art, I think I need a better grounding in a conventional visual art form as a means of entry into the field. Or something.
Hmmm.
Update (March ’09): What I need to do – what I should have applied for in 2007, instead of a BFA which was stupid-overambitious – is a Diploma of Visual Art. Duh.
I’ll be done just in time for the apocalypse; it’ll be great.
Shannon Holopainen
(via Freakley.)
Live Art
From the UK’s Live Art Development Agency:
Disrupting borders, breaking rules, defying traditions, resisting definitions, asking awkward questions and activating audiences, Live Art breaks the rules about who is making art, how they are making it and who they are making it for.
Live Art practices have proved to be especially equipped to meet the complexity and sophistication of contemporary audiences’ values, identities and expectations. Live Art questions assumptions and defies expectations about who an audience can be, what they might be interested in, and the means by which they can be addressed.
Live Art occupies a huge range of sites and circumstances, from the institutional to artist led interventions; from actions in galleries and performances in theatres, to artists working outside of the constraints of official culture, within civic or social spheres, in challenging and unexpected sites, or at the points where live and mediated cultures converge. Some may experience Live Art in a gallery, others in a theatre, and others still as an occurrence in some unusual location or a process in which they are involved.
Live Art can also span extremities of scales – from intimate one on one encounters, to civic spectacles, to the mass participation of virtual events. Wherever they may take place or whatever shape they may be, Live Art practices are concerned with all kinds of interventions in the public sphere and all kinds of encounters with an audience.
Live Art offers immersive experiences, often disrupting distinctions between spectator and participant. Live Art asks us what it means to be here, now. In the simultaneity and interactivity of a media saturated society, Live Art is about immediacy and reality: creating spaces to explore the experience of things, the ambiguities of meaning and the responsibilities of our individual agency.
Live Art is on the frontline of enquiries into what our culture is and where it is located, who our artists are and where they come from, what an audience can be and how they can be addressed.
Jason Maling
From website:
From drawing and durational process, through to live workshops and public performance, Maling’s work can best be described by the term ‘Live Art’. It extends through a broad range of media and is characterised by a formality of composition with a fluidity of outcome. Often appearing game-like, the roles of players and the rules of play continually evolve through individual and collective expressions of what is ‘allowed’. The results can be as simple as a broken tool or as elaborate as a sprawling narrative. It’s about the space between what could happen and what did.
Of particular note: Project George.
Sophie Calle
From the Tate Britain’s catalogue piece on 1998 show The Birthday Ceremony:
Sophie Calle is fascinated by the interface between our public lives and our private selves. This has led her to investigate patterns of behaviour using techniques akin to those of a private investigator, a psychologist, or a forensic scientist. It has also led her to investigate her own behaviour so that her life, as lived and as imagined, has informed many of her most interesting works.
…
The Birthday Ceremony draws our attention to the way in which we construct our identity around secret rituals (from forms of self-indulgence to forms of self-denial) and surround ourselves with objects and activities that give meaning and substance to both our private and our public lives.
Description of Maria Turner, from Paul Auster’s “Leviathan“:
I found her a little scary, perhaps even perverse (which lent a certain excitement to our initial contacts), but as time went on I understood that she was … an unorthodox person who lived her life according to a set of bizarre, private rituals. Every experience was systemized for her, a self-contained adventure that generated its own risks and limitations…
Maria was an artist, but the work she did had nothing to do with creating objects commonly described as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer, but none of these descriptions was accurate, and in the end I don’t think she can be pigeonholed in any way. Her work was too nutty for that, too idiosyncratic, too personal to be thought of as belonging to any particular medium or discipline. Ideas would take hold of her, she would work on projects, there would be concrete results that would be shown in galleries, but this activity didn’t stem from a desire to make art so much as from a need to indulge her obsessions, to live her life precisely as she wanted to live it. Living always came first, and a number of her most time consuming projects were done strictly for herself and never shown to anyone.
Interesting June 2007 Guardian article.
I think so.
Wesley Willis
I Feel Better After I Type To You
From Lot 49:
Within the third of the ten files of user search queries AOL mistakenly released, there’s a poem of sorts. Between May 7 and May 31 of this year, AOL user 23187425 submitted a series of more than 8,200 queries with no evident intention of finding anything – only a handful of the entries are paired with a search results URL. Rather, the author’s series of queries forms a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.
Whether it’s fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It’s a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberation. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL’s search engine?
AOL user 23187425’s “stream of consciousness soliloquy” has now been turned into a book by Superbunker (Superbunker being “a framework for conducting and disseminating cultural research… operating as a cross between a think tank and a decentralized federation of neo-alchemical laboratories..”).
I want one.