MoMA grotesqueries

I was at MoMA on Saturday and saw a couple of things of interest (derive-yr-own-grotesque):

* Walid Raad, a Lebonese artist, has a piece in their sprawling He Is Every exhibition entitled Oh, God, He Said Talking to a Tree. The work is composed of a series of smoke shapes materially extracted from a larger image of catastrophe and isolated on individual white fields. It's a poetic visual, two rows of square(-ish) framed cloud figures, with some text in the final frame.




















* Their highlight show now is the video work of Pippilotti Rist [Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)], presented in a large central gallery on the second floor as a series of wall-sized highly saturated projections that flood the space. In the center there's a tubular couch; people lounge in hordes; the effect is verging on psychedelia. The images melt into one another in off-putting (mostly fleshy/botanical) progressions: flower petals up nostrils and the like. It's spectacular; ~60-70 visitors, probably, were camped out in the room, mesmerized.

Check out clips here.

an interesting notion

from Craig Dworkin's Reading the Illegible:

Grotesk = German word for sanserif

"The sanserif look that [Jan] Tschichold and his contemporaries took to be a self-evident zeitgeist evocation of radical modernity had originally been revived, at the end of the eighteenth century, as the signifier of the classical, conservative past. For the romantic-era reader, the sanserif -- in marked and diametric contrast to a mechanized modernity -- possessed the unmistakable 'associations of rugged antiquity.'"

James Castle show -- a response

Despite my skepticism at an exhibition advertised as "Outsider Art, Inside [the PMA, no less...]," I am glad to see such a large institution recognizing a body of work so untraditional and idiosyncratic -- especially when it allows hordes of non-art addicts exposure to something left field from Cezanne. As usual, the museum did a good job of contextualizing Castle's life and work in a thorough, if predictable, presentation. The particular aesthetic affinity for 'structures,' as the wall text put it, was really fascinating to connect throughout Castle's work, from his soot-and-spit sketches of lock mechanisms and abstracted cardboard doors to reproduced and permutated letterforms later on. His string-and-cardboard birds were to me quite beautiful and his sketches of 'Book-head man," especially over the pages of a math primer, were really stunning both visually and for their psychological implications. That motif in particular made me think of Louise Bourgeois's Femme Maison, a woman with a house-head that she repeated in several drawings to gesture at domesticity subsuming the female mindset. Similarly the Castle drawings seem to reveal the artist's mental absorption into the printed book, whether premade or his own.
Castle's tendency towards manufacturing things with string and other materials lent itself to his obsession with the physical book form. The idea of what a book might mean to a deaf person, someone to whom language only has visual and semantic properties, is intriguing. The physical construction of the word is elevated, as evidenced in Castle's gridded calendars full of text and meticulous letter diagrams, where letterforms are drawn carefully over a field of continuous mechanical text, and sometimes warped, reversed or volumized. Castle even explored characters of languages beyond his own, which were no doubt to him foreign in both meaning and sound. This in itself reveals what a purely visual compulsion they held for him. In exploring language it is tremendously difficult to isolate one sensory or intellectual impact from another -- sound from sight, denotation from connotation -- but Castle was afforded an ironic rare view of language that was purely visual.

The Bone Room

Like Jen, I'll end my post on a gift giving note. Yesterday, a friend told me that contrary to popular belief, it is not illegal to buy human bones in the US. At the Bone Room in Berkeley, they have a whole array of articulated human skeletons and individual parts. The most expensive are human skulls, which are about 500, but some of the individual bones, priced at 4 dollars, make a very economical present. If you're buying for the holidays though, I recommend you start early, as there appears to be a "wait list for femurs."

it sucks when people don't understand your feelings

lately i've been thinking about how people don't communicate enough, and then they forget how and get hurt feelings. its things like this that can make daily life get grotesque. do you know this song by new order? its so good. my bike just got stolen.


Every time I think of you
I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue
It's no problem of mine but it's a problem I find
Living a life that I can't leave behind
There's no sense in telling me
The wisdom of a fool won't set you free
But that's the way that it goes
And it's what nobody knows
While every day my confusion grows

Every time I see you falling
I get down on my knees and pray
I'm waiting for that final moment
You'll say the words that I can't say

I feel fine and I feel good
I'm feeling like I never should
Whenever I get this way, I just don't know what to say
Why can't we be ourselves like we were yesterday
I'm not sure what this could mean
I don't think you're what you seem
I do admit to myself
That if I hurt someone else
Then I'll never see just what we're meant to be

Every time I see you falling
I get down on my knees and pray
I'm waiting for that final moment
You'll say the words that I can't say
Every time I see you falling
I get down on my knees and pray
I'm waiting for that final moment
You'll say the words that I can't say

Every time I see you falling (Falling, falling, falling, falling...)
I'm waiting for that final moment (Moment, moment, moment, moment...)

Every time I see you falling
I get down on my knees and pray
I'm waiting for that final moment
You'll say the words that I can't say
Every time I see you falling
I get down on my knees and pray
I'm waiting for that final moment
You'll say the words that I can't say
Every time I see you falling
I get down on my knees and pray
I'm waiting for that final moment
You'll say the words that I can't say

Grotesque Potpourri

I wasn't sure what I wanted to close out the semester on the blog with. There are so many grotesque things out there! So, as my holiday gifts to you guys, here's a nice little potpourri of grotesque fun!

~Did someone give you a Cosby sweater, hand carved manger scenes, or scented candles for Christmas this year? Don't feel bad; check out all the crappy gifts out there!

www.Badgiftemporium.com

~Wanna get someone a bad gift?

www.stupid.com

Here's a killer whale attack that was pretty gross:



Here's a sadder one. This poor guy had his entire face eaten off by a bear:



Finally, to end on a high note, here's a pug that can SAY "I love you" :

80s Hairstyles

here are a bunch of 80s hairstyles. remember when these were cool, and then not cool, and now they're kind of cool again but only on a certain kind of person, probably who is extra long and extra ironic? some of them i think could easily still be worn without much of a second glance from the general public, but then some of them... sheesh! this only happens when people don't have enough of some thing in their life. or maybe not. maybe there's something that predisposes certain people into forever thinking that that's a perfectly acceptable and fashionable way to wear your hair. the same way that some people think that having 6 lizards is really cool. or that wearing satin shirts is still hip. imagine that woman waking up in the morning in 1985 and thinking "damn. it's gonna be a good year." then imagine that same woman in 1996 curled up in a ball in the shower crying her eyes out.