Where I will be living with two chefs, a waiter, and a dog named Tank.
write me, I will write back?
30 Spring Park Avenue, Boston, MA 02130
USA
write me, I will write back?
30 Spring Park Avenue, Boston, MA 02130
USA
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Long Live Kim Jong Il
The mourning begins
Dear Leader, Supreme Leader, Our Father, The General, Generalissimo: a man of many names, Kim Jong-il was among the most enigmatic, controlling and contradictory of the world's recent modern leaders. Americas View : Vice Magazine.
Dear Leader, Supreme Leader, Our Father, The General, Generalissimo: a man of many names, Kim Jong-il was among the most enigmatic, controlling and contradictory of the world's recent modern leaders.
1/ According to his official biographers, his birth in 1941 in Baekdu Mountain was apparently prophesied by a swallow and heralded with a double rainbow and a new star in the heavens.
2/ A near-obsessive film buff and a fan of Elizabeth Taylor in particular, he reportedly had a collection of 20,000 plus video tapes, with his all time favourites including Rambo and Godzilla.
3/ The dictator travelled by private train for state visits – a decision believed to be connected to his apparent fear of flying, a phobia he was believed to share with his father.
4/ His private train journeys were as luxurious as befitted a leader of North Korea, despite the millions left behind starving due to famine: one Russian emissary who traveled across Russia by train with Kim described how live lobsters were airlifted daily to his train.
5/ Kim ordered the kidnapping of Shin Sang-ok, the South Korean film director, and his actress wife, Choi Eun-hee, in 1978 in order to build up North Korea's film industry. They made seven films before escaping to the West in 1986.
(One can be seen here: PULGASARI)
6/ Kim apparently produced a patriotic 100-part documentary series on the history of his North Korean homeland as well as writing a book entitled On the Art of Cinema.
7/ Film was not his only passion: Kim also apparently composed six operas and enjoyed staging musicals, again according to his official biography.
8/ He was hailed as a demigod style guru in North Korea – although South Korea portrayed him as a vain playboy with a penchant for bouffant hair, jumpsuits and platform shoes designed to make him look taller.
9 / He reportedly spread the myth across North Korea that he could control the weather with his moods, as if by magic.
10/ There have been reports that he would refuse to consume anything not produced in North Korea – although he made an exception of French wine as reflected in the 10-000 strong collection of bottles in his cellar.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Its Happening in Downer's Grove, IL
Downers Grove prides itself on the presence of a large collection of Sears-Roebuck Catalog Homes, built using purchased kits between 1908 and 1940.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Occupy the Press
By Jeff Downer
For Artist Publications: Kathy Slade
November. 22, 2011
Since the advent of the medium’s conception in the nineteenth century, photography has been identified with the printed page format, rendering photography almost synonymous to that of a collection of bound prints, termed a photo-album or a photobook. When William Henry Fox Talbot first ascertained that salts of silver were sensitive to light, he would make impressions or outlines of various materials and objects in a two-step process with a rather rudimentary emulsion. Exposing the objects on top of the silver salts to light presented Talbot with what we know today as the negative, an echo, if you will, of the very object’s contours and dimensions, and a sheet of paper that documented how we perceive the object on a two dimensional plane, this being the positive or the print. Talbot would later publish a series of these experiments in what is called the first ever photobook, “The Pencil of Nature,” published between 1844 and 1846. Photobooks, and photography in general have obviously come a long way since this rather elemental inception, both formally and conceptually the photobook can undoubtedly be seen as an autonomous art form, with the imagery, design and presentation of the book that makes it an independent object in itself. Artists’ books (an independently published book with limited editions) have doubly fostered this idea that the book is to be considered a self-contained work of art, even a portable exhibition of the artist. Some photographers in more recent years, have engaged with this medium, allowing them to bypass the art world and allowing their work to be seen by a larger audience. To deviate from the gallery or museum wall was not only a choice for photographers, but an inherent strategy, like in the works of Paul Graham or Alec Soth, whose very forms and subject matters fit the narrative confines of a book much more readily than they would an exhibition. Yet these narratives are not bound by a rigid concept or ideology and are somewhat cryptic in their reading, challenging our accustomed way of perception and understanding. And, it was photographers Nan Goldin and Larry Clark whose independently published photobooks offered a first hand experience of new art and a thorough documentation of a visually repressed demographic of drug-users, transvestites and youth culture to the conforming domestic aspects of their time. It was through the very subject matter that Goldin and Clark showed, and the rather conceptual narratives of Graham and Soth, that contested and changed the way traditional photobooks and photography operated within society, and how the medium is consumed and perceived en masse.
One palpable strategy that has been quite successful throughout art history that aims to challenge mainstream ways of seeing and consuming visual culture is to shock the audience through subject matter. Such is the case when it comes to photographer Larry Clark and his photobook Tulsa, with his “unflinching view of a previously undocumented drug culture in middle America” (PHG), that includes teenage-sex, guns, and domestic violence and presents itself to an audience who is quite removed from this type of behavior. Published as a photoessay from photographs taken between 1963 and 1971, Tulsa operated as a “true photo-diary” in that Clark was able to reconfigure the documentary mode where “instead of it being a view from the outside...here [is] the authentic view from the inside” (Parr, Badger, 260). It was an intimacy that Clark had with these subjects, his cohorts if you will, that enabled him to be around this culture and to shoot them with his camera as they simultaneously shot amphetamines and guns. Clark states that he is “just one of the people, one of the guys” and his relationship to his subjects has “never been [as] a distanced observer” but rather “it’s always been autobiographical” (LC), making Tulsa’s success within the photographic community partially bound to this apparent authenticity. Tulsa not only “extended the boundaries of acceptable subject matter for photographers” but became “one of the most talked about and important books of the decade” (Parr, Badger, 260) and it was on behalf of Clark’s publisher, Ralph Gibson’s Lustrum Press that the photographs and their subject matter started to creep into the private and comfortable realms of the public household. Ralph Gibson, a photographer who moved to New York in 1969 started a publishing company that enabled photographers to have more control over their own books unlike major publishing companies that saw photobooks as a commodity with which to make revenue. Lustrum Press is considered by many as “the best of the small American photobook publishers of the 70’s” (Parr, Badger, 260) and is not afraid of controversy exemplified by publishing and disseminating Clark’s project that automatically molds its viewers into a unrevealed voyeur within the impervious confines of their homes. An idea that probably coincided with Clark’s intentionality that these photographs were to become a book, and not an exhibition (for who would exhibit such controversial subject matter in the first place?). Clark wanted his work to enter into people’s homes where it could confront and provoke their relationship to these subjects, and also to themselves as observers, all the while giving expression to an otherwise abject culture.
Mimicking an aesthetic that has ties to the past, inadvertently summons a dialogue between its’ historical significance and its contemporary usage that can either add to or contest with this dialogue. Photographer Nan Goldin readily appropriates the snapshot aesthetic that began with the advent of Kodak in the 1950’s, along with its spectacular slideshow presentations, enabling Goldin to speak the language of family photography albums. However, Goldin’s “family at that time” (transexuals, transvestites, homosexuals, victims of aids, love, and violence) encompassed a larger subject matter that traditionally “would be deemed inappropriate for aesthetic consideration” (Bussard, 16), since they had been removed from visual representations of society up to that point. Goldin made her visual diary public by screening the slideshow of several hundred photographs that were taken between 1973 and 1985, at clubs and makeshift venues in Lower Manhattan to a small audience of familiars, who were more likely than not to be featured in the photographs. The slideshow started to gain attention within the art world, leading up to when Goldin was asked to show it in the 1985 Whitney Biennale, where it was noticed by Aperture Books’ Marvin Heiferman and Mark Holborn who synthesized it into a photobook one year later, in 1986, with the title “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”. Founded by photographers such as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Dorthea Lange and writers Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Aperture Books, a non-profit, charitable organization, was known to publish work which they personally believed in. Aperture gained a reputation as the “nearest thing to a mainstream publisher for non-commercial American photographers”, in that they were able to disseminate widely, constitute themselves as a household name, and publish what is thought to be “a fair number of the best American photobooks of the 1970s and 80’s (Parr, Badger, 237). The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in book form has been “immensely influential” in that it stands as “the first (and best) of a whole photobook genre” termed the confessional mode that has been “prove[en] to be one of the most popular genres of the 1990’s” (Parr, Badger, 39). Goldin’s family is “far from the bland uniformity of the American dream and its materialism”(Costa), in that they rejected both objective truths and cultural narratives that were rather immutable and influential during the conservative Reagan administration in the United States. The Ballad was so far-reaching in its diaristic mode that it has “set the emotional agenda for much contemporary photography of everyday life” (Parr, Badger, 290), and can still be considered relevant to today’s young photographers as it exemplifies an honest and poetic mirror held up to our times.
Film, in regards to the cinematic motion picture, can be seen as synonymous with the photobook, in that it’s very sequencing of still images creates a narrative that is authored by the photographer. However, two photobooks that apply a narrative structure in a way that intentionally contorts and challenges traditional linear readings, in order to make it’s viewers more cognitive and aware of a possible underlying concept are, A Shimmer of Possibility, by Paul Graham and Sleeping by the Mississippi, by Alec Soth. In A Shimmer of Possiblity, Graham showcases ambiguous, everyday actions, from mowing the lawn, smoking a cigarette, to eating greasy fried chicken at a bus stop. This is formally termed an elliptical narrative (where sequencing is not linear, but staggered and repeated) in order to “talk-albeit even cryptically- about political matters” (Badger, 230). Graham’s political undercurrent “focus[es] on the kind of people more affluent Americans...tend to ignore,” a social profile consisting of Hispanics, African Americans and the homeless (Badger 232). Graham photographs these demographics executing familiar activities, but in a way that highlights their significance within their social role. Grahams’ narratives, using no definitive beginnings or endings, were inspired by undramatic events found in literary realism, extrapolated into an aesthetic so “ordinary that [they] might have been taken by an amateur for posting on Flickr, or even taken by a surveillance camera” (Badger, 231). The book itself, (one of) the “most interesting and significant in recent years” (Badger, 230), is divided into twelve separate narrative volumes, each housing between one to sixty images. This inconsistency makes the work both physically and intellectually interactive, where the reader must leaf through these distinct volumes all the while coming to terms with their own narrative meanings and assumptions.
In Sleeping by the Mississippi, Soth’s narrative is also not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, yet is one that has ties to a spirit of wanderlust, that is formally paralleled in the reading of the book, in that the viewer is shown a poetic document of the people, towns, and landscapes that encompass the Mississippi river and is asked to judiciously traverse the lyrically sequenced photographs. Soth “hints at tales about marginal and disregarded lives” that bestow a sense of dignity and consequence to the subjects pictured, creating a lyrically poetic and dark book. Soth “takes us back to the roots of the photobook” (Parr, Badger, 50), in that the first pressing of the book was self-published and distributed by Soth himself. Using modern technology, Soth conceived the book’s layout on a computer, printed the pages on ink-jet paper, and bound the project, making it “indistinguishable from a conventionally printed book”; an act that seemed to “subvert the notion of the photobook as a mass medium” (Parr, Badger, 16). This maquette (a stand-in or an imitation) of Sleeping by the Mississippi was disseminated more or less through word of mouth, and eventually landed in the hands of German publisher Gerhard Steidl, who, one year later published it. Soth and Graham both worked with Steidl’s “unique philosophy which revolves around the idea of artists as king and publisher as servant” (Jaeger, 252). Steidl is not interested in how much a book project costs as long as he is able to “turn the artists’ vision into reality”(Steidl, 255) through an exceptionally high standard of quality. Steidl is one of the “few remaining publishing houses to be independently operated by its founding owner”(Steidl) who is in total control of the manufacturing process. Today, many mainstream publishers have outsourced a number of steps of the publishing processes to different countries in order to lower the overall cost of publishing, for instance, much printing is now done in China. This distances the artist from their work, in contrast to Steidl’s in-house process, which allows for minute edits and adjustments by the artist who follow their project from the initial layout to the final binding in Steidls’ residency program (on site apartments, restaurants, lounges and libraries) under the name Steidlville. Both Soth and Graham have implemented themselves in the history of photobooks through their commanding narrative structures that take on “filmic haikus”, or a visual journey that has been combined with Steidl’s particular vision of creating remarkable books that entice viewers to reexamine what is placed before them.
By employing visual devices in art that affect an audience through content or subject matter, mimicking an aesthetic in a way that defies historic predispositions, or creating a non-linear, malleable narrative housed in book form, artists significantly provoke conventional methods of how visual culture operates, and is consumed and perceived by its viewers. Such is the case with photographers Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Paul Graham and Alec Soth, who successfully used these tactics in their own practice. But it because of their publishers: Lustrum Press, Aperture, or Steidl, that their work is able to be disseminated throughout the public where it remodels and furthers the visual culture of photobooks and photography in general. Books and photobooks alike, can be seen as conveyors of ideas, and when we place them in the context of history, they become mementos of civilization; an extensive way to invoke cultures at any given time. In the art world, books of important work are more accessible than that of an exhibition, and can be referenced periodically throughout time, underlining the importance of the printed page for dissemination purposes, that assists the work in becoming more pervasive and significant within society. Independently published work has become a unique, separate entity from that of the exhibition, in that it bypasses the conforming influence of museum culture, allowing the artist to be in direct dialogue with an audience without the neutralizing or liberating commentary that is often embedded in the exhibition. “Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible” (Tuchman, 13).
Parr, Martin & Badger, Gerry. The Photobook: A History volume I. New York, NY. Phaidon Press, 2004.
Parr, Martin & Badger, Gerry. The Photobook: A History volume II. New York, NY. Phaidon Press, 2006.
Badger, Gerry. The Pleasures of Good Photographs. Elliptical Narratives: Some Thoughts on the Photobook. New York, NY. Aperture Books, 2010.
Jaeger, Anne-Celine. Image Makers Image Takers. New York, NY. Thames & Hudson, 2007.
PHG. “Exhibitions 2011: Larry Clark Tulsa” Presentation House Gallery. September 10- November 11, 2011.
Steidl, Gerhard. “About Steidl” Steidl. 2011.
Costa, Guido. Nan Goldin. New York, NY. Phaidon, 2005.
Bussard, A. Katherine. So the Story Goes. Chicago, IL. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2006.
Swanson, Virginia Mary & Himes, D. Darius. Publish Your Photography Book. New York, NY. Princeton Architectural Press, 2011.
Clark, Larry. Tulsa. New York, NY. Grove Press, 2000. (Second Edition)
Goldin, Nan. Ballad of Sexual Dependency. New York, NY. Aperture Publishers, 1986
Graham, Paul. A Shimmer of Possibility. London, UK. SteidlMACK, 2011. (Softcover Edition)
Soth, Alec. Sleeping by the Mississippi. Gottingen, Germany. Steidl, 2008. (Third Edition)
For Artist Publications: Kathy Slade
November. 22, 2011
Since the advent of the medium’s conception in the nineteenth century, photography has been identified with the printed page format, rendering photography almost synonymous to that of a collection of bound prints, termed a photo-album or a photobook. When William Henry Fox Talbot first ascertained that salts of silver were sensitive to light, he would make impressions or outlines of various materials and objects in a two-step process with a rather rudimentary emulsion. Exposing the objects on top of the silver salts to light presented Talbot with what we know today as the negative, an echo, if you will, of the very object’s contours and dimensions, and a sheet of paper that documented how we perceive the object on a two dimensional plane, this being the positive or the print. Talbot would later publish a series of these experiments in what is called the first ever photobook, “The Pencil of Nature,” published between 1844 and 1846. Photobooks, and photography in general have obviously come a long way since this rather elemental inception, both formally and conceptually the photobook can undoubtedly be seen as an autonomous art form, with the imagery, design and presentation of the book that makes it an independent object in itself. Artists’ books (an independently published book with limited editions) have doubly fostered this idea that the book is to be considered a self-contained work of art, even a portable exhibition of the artist. Some photographers in more recent years, have engaged with this medium, allowing them to bypass the art world and allowing their work to be seen by a larger audience. To deviate from the gallery or museum wall was not only a choice for photographers, but an inherent strategy, like in the works of Paul Graham or Alec Soth, whose very forms and subject matters fit the narrative confines of a book much more readily than they would an exhibition. Yet these narratives are not bound by a rigid concept or ideology and are somewhat cryptic in their reading, challenging our accustomed way of perception and understanding. And, it was photographers Nan Goldin and Larry Clark whose independently published photobooks offered a first hand experience of new art and a thorough documentation of a visually repressed demographic of drug-users, transvestites and youth culture to the conforming domestic aspects of their time. It was through the very subject matter that Goldin and Clark showed, and the rather conceptual narratives of Graham and Soth, that contested and changed the way traditional photobooks and photography operated within society, and how the medium is consumed and perceived en masse.
One palpable strategy that has been quite successful throughout art history that aims to challenge mainstream ways of seeing and consuming visual culture is to shock the audience through subject matter. Such is the case when it comes to photographer Larry Clark and his photobook Tulsa, with his “unflinching view of a previously undocumented drug culture in middle America” (PHG), that includes teenage-sex, guns, and domestic violence and presents itself to an audience who is quite removed from this type of behavior. Published as a photoessay from photographs taken between 1963 and 1971, Tulsa operated as a “true photo-diary” in that Clark was able to reconfigure the documentary mode where “instead of it being a view from the outside...here [is] the authentic view from the inside” (Parr, Badger, 260). It was an intimacy that Clark had with these subjects, his cohorts if you will, that enabled him to be around this culture and to shoot them with his camera as they simultaneously shot amphetamines and guns. Clark states that he is “just one of the people, one of the guys” and his relationship to his subjects has “never been [as] a distanced observer” but rather “it’s always been autobiographical” (LC), making Tulsa’s success within the photographic community partially bound to this apparent authenticity. Tulsa not only “extended the boundaries of acceptable subject matter for photographers” but became “one of the most talked about and important books of the decade” (Parr, Badger, 260) and it was on behalf of Clark’s publisher, Ralph Gibson’s Lustrum Press that the photographs and their subject matter started to creep into the private and comfortable realms of the public household. Ralph Gibson, a photographer who moved to New York in 1969 started a publishing company that enabled photographers to have more control over their own books unlike major publishing companies that saw photobooks as a commodity with which to make revenue. Lustrum Press is considered by many as “the best of the small American photobook publishers of the 70’s” (Parr, Badger, 260) and is not afraid of controversy exemplified by publishing and disseminating Clark’s project that automatically molds its viewers into a unrevealed voyeur within the impervious confines of their homes. An idea that probably coincided with Clark’s intentionality that these photographs were to become a book, and not an exhibition (for who would exhibit such controversial subject matter in the first place?). Clark wanted his work to enter into people’s homes where it could confront and provoke their relationship to these subjects, and also to themselves as observers, all the while giving expression to an otherwise abject culture.
Mimicking an aesthetic that has ties to the past, inadvertently summons a dialogue between its’ historical significance and its contemporary usage that can either add to or contest with this dialogue. Photographer Nan Goldin readily appropriates the snapshot aesthetic that began with the advent of Kodak in the 1950’s, along with its spectacular slideshow presentations, enabling Goldin to speak the language of family photography albums. However, Goldin’s “family at that time” (transexuals, transvestites, homosexuals, victims of aids, love, and violence) encompassed a larger subject matter that traditionally “would be deemed inappropriate for aesthetic consideration” (Bussard, 16), since they had been removed from visual representations of society up to that point. Goldin made her visual diary public by screening the slideshow of several hundred photographs that were taken between 1973 and 1985, at clubs and makeshift venues in Lower Manhattan to a small audience of familiars, who were more likely than not to be featured in the photographs. The slideshow started to gain attention within the art world, leading up to when Goldin was asked to show it in the 1985 Whitney Biennale, where it was noticed by Aperture Books’ Marvin Heiferman and Mark Holborn who synthesized it into a photobook one year later, in 1986, with the title “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”. Founded by photographers such as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Dorthea Lange and writers Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Aperture Books, a non-profit, charitable organization, was known to publish work which they personally believed in. Aperture gained a reputation as the “nearest thing to a mainstream publisher for non-commercial American photographers”, in that they were able to disseminate widely, constitute themselves as a household name, and publish what is thought to be “a fair number of the best American photobooks of the 1970s and 80’s (Parr, Badger, 237). The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in book form has been “immensely influential” in that it stands as “the first (and best) of a whole photobook genre” termed the confessional mode that has been “prove[en] to be one of the most popular genres of the 1990’s” (Parr, Badger, 39). Goldin’s family is “far from the bland uniformity of the American dream and its materialism”(Costa), in that they rejected both objective truths and cultural narratives that were rather immutable and influential during the conservative Reagan administration in the United States. The Ballad was so far-reaching in its diaristic mode that it has “set the emotional agenda for much contemporary photography of everyday life” (Parr, Badger, 290), and can still be considered relevant to today’s young photographers as it exemplifies an honest and poetic mirror held up to our times.
Film, in regards to the cinematic motion picture, can be seen as synonymous with the photobook, in that it’s very sequencing of still images creates a narrative that is authored by the photographer. However, two photobooks that apply a narrative structure in a way that intentionally contorts and challenges traditional linear readings, in order to make it’s viewers more cognitive and aware of a possible underlying concept are, A Shimmer of Possibility, by Paul Graham and Sleeping by the Mississippi, by Alec Soth. In A Shimmer of Possiblity, Graham showcases ambiguous, everyday actions, from mowing the lawn, smoking a cigarette, to eating greasy fried chicken at a bus stop. This is formally termed an elliptical narrative (where sequencing is not linear, but staggered and repeated) in order to “talk-albeit even cryptically- about political matters” (Badger, 230). Graham’s political undercurrent “focus[es] on the kind of people more affluent Americans...tend to ignore,” a social profile consisting of Hispanics, African Americans and the homeless (Badger 232). Graham photographs these demographics executing familiar activities, but in a way that highlights their significance within their social role. Grahams’ narratives, using no definitive beginnings or endings, were inspired by undramatic events found in literary realism, extrapolated into an aesthetic so “ordinary that [they] might have been taken by an amateur for posting on Flickr, or even taken by a surveillance camera” (Badger, 231). The book itself, (one of) the “most interesting and significant in recent years” (Badger, 230), is divided into twelve separate narrative volumes, each housing between one to sixty images. This inconsistency makes the work both physically and intellectually interactive, where the reader must leaf through these distinct volumes all the while coming to terms with their own narrative meanings and assumptions.
In Sleeping by the Mississippi, Soth’s narrative is also not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, yet is one that has ties to a spirit of wanderlust, that is formally paralleled in the reading of the book, in that the viewer is shown a poetic document of the people, towns, and landscapes that encompass the Mississippi river and is asked to judiciously traverse the lyrically sequenced photographs. Soth “hints at tales about marginal and disregarded lives” that bestow a sense of dignity and consequence to the subjects pictured, creating a lyrically poetic and dark book. Soth “takes us back to the roots of the photobook” (Parr, Badger, 50), in that the first pressing of the book was self-published and distributed by Soth himself. Using modern technology, Soth conceived the book’s layout on a computer, printed the pages on ink-jet paper, and bound the project, making it “indistinguishable from a conventionally printed book”; an act that seemed to “subvert the notion of the photobook as a mass medium” (Parr, Badger, 16). This maquette (a stand-in or an imitation) of Sleeping by the Mississippi was disseminated more or less through word of mouth, and eventually landed in the hands of German publisher Gerhard Steidl, who, one year later published it. Soth and Graham both worked with Steidl’s “unique philosophy which revolves around the idea of artists as king and publisher as servant” (Jaeger, 252). Steidl is not interested in how much a book project costs as long as he is able to “turn the artists’ vision into reality”(Steidl, 255) through an exceptionally high standard of quality. Steidl is one of the “few remaining publishing houses to be independently operated by its founding owner”(Steidl) who is in total control of the manufacturing process. Today, many mainstream publishers have outsourced a number of steps of the publishing processes to different countries in order to lower the overall cost of publishing, for instance, much printing is now done in China. This distances the artist from their work, in contrast to Steidl’s in-house process, which allows for minute edits and adjustments by the artist who follow their project from the initial layout to the final binding in Steidls’ residency program (on site apartments, restaurants, lounges and libraries) under the name Steidlville. Both Soth and Graham have implemented themselves in the history of photobooks through their commanding narrative structures that take on “filmic haikus”, or a visual journey that has been combined with Steidl’s particular vision of creating remarkable books that entice viewers to reexamine what is placed before them.
By employing visual devices in art that affect an audience through content or subject matter, mimicking an aesthetic in a way that defies historic predispositions, or creating a non-linear, malleable narrative housed in book form, artists significantly provoke conventional methods of how visual culture operates, and is consumed and perceived by its viewers. Such is the case with photographers Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Paul Graham and Alec Soth, who successfully used these tactics in their own practice. But it because of their publishers: Lustrum Press, Aperture, or Steidl, that their work is able to be disseminated throughout the public where it remodels and furthers the visual culture of photobooks and photography in general. Books and photobooks alike, can be seen as conveyors of ideas, and when we place them in the context of history, they become mementos of civilization; an extensive way to invoke cultures at any given time. In the art world, books of important work are more accessible than that of an exhibition, and can be referenced periodically throughout time, underlining the importance of the printed page for dissemination purposes, that assists the work in becoming more pervasive and significant within society. Independently published work has become a unique, separate entity from that of the exhibition, in that it bypasses the conforming influence of museum culture, allowing the artist to be in direct dialogue with an audience without the neutralizing or liberating commentary that is often embedded in the exhibition. “Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible” (Tuchman, 13).
Works Cited
Parr, Martin & Badger, Gerry. The Photobook: A History volume I. New York, NY. Phaidon Press, 2004.
Parr, Martin & Badger, Gerry. The Photobook: A History volume II. New York, NY. Phaidon Press, 2006.
Badger, Gerry. The Pleasures of Good Photographs. Elliptical Narratives: Some Thoughts on the Photobook. New York, NY. Aperture Books, 2010.
Jaeger, Anne-Celine. Image Makers Image Takers. New York, NY. Thames & Hudson, 2007.
PHG. “Exhibitions 2011: Larry Clark Tulsa” Presentation House Gallery. September 10- November 11, 2011.
Steidl, Gerhard. “About Steidl” Steidl. 2011.
Costa, Guido. Nan Goldin. New York, NY. Phaidon, 2005.
Bussard, A. Katherine. So the Story Goes. Chicago, IL. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2006.
Works Consulted
Swanson, Virginia Mary & Himes, D. Darius. Publish Your Photography Book. New York, NY. Princeton Architectural Press, 2011.
Clark, Larry. Tulsa. New York, NY. Grove Press, 2000. (Second Edition)
Goldin, Nan. Ballad of Sexual Dependency. New York, NY. Aperture Publishers, 1986
Graham, Paul. A Shimmer of Possibility. London, UK. SteidlMACK, 2011. (Softcover Edition)
Soth, Alec. Sleeping by the Mississippi. Gottingen, Germany. Steidl, 2008. (Third Edition)
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Reasons to Survive November
by Tony Hoagland
November like a train wreck –
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.
The sky is a thick, cold gauze –
but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.
– Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.
I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself
with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.
But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,
and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over
and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.
The sky is a thick, cold gauze –
but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.
– Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.
I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself
with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.
But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,
and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over
and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Buy Here Pay Here
"Buy Here Pay Here"
Self-Publication
Soft-cover, 6x9 inches
20 Pages, 11 b/w photographs
signed in editions of 15
$12
contact if interested
Self-Publication
Soft-cover, 6x9 inches
20 Pages, 11 b/w photographs
signed in editions of 15
$12
contact if interested
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Friday, September 9, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
last leg
“Is that a drink?
No, it’s a band my mom went to see in concert”
-Amtrak 1:16am nearing Sacramento Ca.
Train 3 hours late, arrived in Oakland at 12:45am.
four old men, all with the same, top of a button mushroom-like hairstyle, old-sun-stained lace in color, sporting wiry yellow-white neck beards, black suspenders and copper-rimmed glasses the size of a tumbler glasses, filed into the dining car and spoke an unknown dialect. They were heading to Pennsylvania, I later found out by Eric, the snack car attendant who was wearing a nice, simple watch who joked with me about Mad Child from Vancouver. The old men were danish speaking amish going home.
Had a mimosa and breakfast in the dining car while circling mount shasta at sunrise, while passing a town called Dunsmuir where all the cars in sight were circa 1950’s, and mostly matte black.
There were many times where I had to restrain myself from prying open the emergency exit window to escape into the untouched forests that traversed crystal clear waters and a ripe pink sky.
I am saddened to leave a lifestyle where you wake up and you know everything you do will be different and unforeseen events will arise as you make your way through untried country. I will also miss the mexican food.
No, it’s a band my mom went to see in concert”
-Amtrak 1:16am nearing Sacramento Ca.
Train 3 hours late, arrived in Oakland at 12:45am.
four old men, all with the same, top of a button mushroom-like hairstyle, old-sun-stained lace in color, sporting wiry yellow-white neck beards, black suspenders and copper-rimmed glasses the size of a tumbler glasses, filed into the dining car and spoke an unknown dialect. They were heading to Pennsylvania, I later found out by Eric, the snack car attendant who was wearing a nice, simple watch who joked with me about Mad Child from Vancouver. The old men were danish speaking amish going home.
Had a mimosa and breakfast in the dining car while circling mount shasta at sunrise, while passing a town called Dunsmuir where all the cars in sight were circa 1950’s, and mostly matte black.
There were many times where I had to restrain myself from prying open the emergency exit window to escape into the untouched forests that traversed crystal clear waters and a ripe pink sky.
I am saddened to leave a lifestyle where you wake up and you know everything you do will be different and unforeseen events will arise as you make your way through untried country. I will also miss the mexican food.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
slept under a plasic fern, tropics, had a moving pathway as white noise for a whole two hours i slept, or rather passed out. i made it to san francisco though.
I had to go to denver from kansas city first, and then wait for the delayed plane. but i am here. i called every hotel, hostel and motel in the city upon arrival, but everything was full.
my psyche is doing contractions squeezing out lemonade, my eyes are bloodshot to the brim, the veins are almost hanging out of my sockets, and my teeth and mouth are like a kitchen sink drain. my fingernails even grew long, how long has it been?
all i want now is some kale and sleep. ive been eating bread and airplane cookies.
listening to al green loudly on headphones in the food court at 5:15am.
have to admit i am happy and excited.
I had to go to denver from kansas city first, and then wait for the delayed plane. but i am here. i called every hotel, hostel and motel in the city upon arrival, but everything was full.
my psyche is doing contractions squeezing out lemonade, my eyes are bloodshot to the brim, the veins are almost hanging out of my sockets, and my teeth and mouth are like a kitchen sink drain. my fingernails even grew long, how long has it been?
all i want now is some kale and sleep. ive been eating bread and airplane cookies.
listening to al green loudly on headphones in the food court at 5:15am.
have to admit i am happy and excited.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
((trapped again in Kansas city. ))
no hangover, and no rain.
wander into DUMBO to Brooklyn Roasters for a free cupping of their beans. They have a five gallon bodum. They have used it once and its hard to pour. Bookstore, flip through a signed edition of Family Business by photographer Mitch Epstein, it sells on amazon for $350. I should have bought it for $125, but alas. Go into Chelsea to see some commercial galleries, but they are all closed for the summer/bummer. Run into Vince Aletti the curator, writer, and eccentric guy at New York Burger eating sweet potoato french fries in basil pesto sauce.
Walk over to Printed Matter Inc. A store dedicated to artist publications! Filled with zines, records, photobooks, and more! I've been here, but I really looked around this time around.
Take the subway through the heart of Brooklyn to the very edge to Coney Island. Words cannot describe this place. It was the best way to end our trip to New York. Lets just say I saw alligators, vomit, a fully tattooed woman, bellybutton lint sculptures, toenail jewelery, carnies, sunsets, food under heat lamps, and screaming people. Rode the 90 year old historic wonderwheel.
Woke up at 4am to an unmarked taxi cab that sped some 70mph to la guardia in 15 minutes. We were passing every car on the road.
I got on a standby flight first class to Kansas City just to get out of la guardia, its terrible. Sat next to a very nice woman who finished the New York Times Crossword in less than one hour. It was called "What Ails Ya". But now I am stranded again. I may just break down and buy a ticket to San Francisco and stay in a Super 8.
out and I need to walk around.
no hangover, and no rain.
wander into DUMBO to Brooklyn Roasters for a free cupping of their beans. They have a five gallon bodum. They have used it once and its hard to pour. Bookstore, flip through a signed edition of Family Business by photographer Mitch Epstein, it sells on amazon for $350. I should have bought it for $125, but alas. Go into Chelsea to see some commercial galleries, but they are all closed for the summer/bummer. Run into Vince Aletti the curator, writer, and eccentric guy at New York Burger eating sweet potoato french fries in basil pesto sauce.
Walk over to Printed Matter Inc. A store dedicated to artist publications! Filled with zines, records, photobooks, and more! I've been here, but I really looked around this time around.
Take the subway through the heart of Brooklyn to the very edge to Coney Island. Words cannot describe this place. It was the best way to end our trip to New York. Lets just say I saw alligators, vomit, a fully tattooed woman, bellybutton lint sculptures, toenail jewelery, carnies, sunsets, food under heat lamps, and screaming people. Rode the 90 year old historic wonderwheel.
Woke up at 4am to an unmarked taxi cab that sped some 70mph to la guardia in 15 minutes. We were passing every car on the road.
I got on a standby flight first class to Kansas City just to get out of la guardia, its terrible. Sat next to a very nice woman who finished the New York Times Crossword in less than one hour. It was called "What Ails Ya". But now I am stranded again. I may just break down and buy a ticket to San Francisco and stay in a Super 8.
out and I need to walk around.
currently trapped at la guardia gate B3, missed three flights, booked.
MoMA was a flash mob that looked more like shopping mall during boxing day than a world renowned modern art gallery featuring the world's greatest art collection. shuffling down escalators, flowing by duchamps in a flow of people, passing all the works that i've spent the passed two years studying in short glimpses, mostly obstructed by hands holding iphones and headsets reiterating the artists statement in every language. in a near panic, I meet up with cody to go for lunch.
get to central park and are now encircled in large black flies while we eat our warm prepackaged trader joes greek salad. at least we are out of the crowds. I think if I had to go down fifth avenue on a daily basis I would wear a robe of rubber snakes, or cover myself in powdered sugar to get people out of my way as I walked steadily down the street.
Go to the Central Park Zoo, its really old, to get away from the crowds and attempt to reconnect with nature. People are seen posing, pretending to put their arms around a snow leopard that sits behind a thick layer of, hopefully one way glass. It was the same way at MoMA, why do people pose in front of famous or strange things, like a Pollack or a Picasso with their thumbs up? They only recognize the paintings from tote bags sold at shopping centers around the continent. Or they don't even see the work in real time, through their own eyes, but through a computer screen that inherently brightens, contrasts and alters life.
buy the Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin at the MoMA bookstore.
We walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into DUMBO (Down under the Manhattan bridge overpass).
Find a great mexican place order long island ice teas. an older puerto rican woman, we name Rosa, is our amazing waitress. She randomly asks Cody if she liked French dressing, we aren't eating a salad. I question them about a particular mexican traditional drink on their menu, no one knows what it is, so they google on their phones, saying if anyone orders it they usually tell the customers they are out of it. Great and cheap place.
Walk down the street to a gastropub, order a beer pronounced Cezzane, like the painter, but is spelled Season. Its made of grains of paradise and is ruby red and delicious. We don't know what an old fashioned is, so we order it because its the only drink I can think of, and we both ask what it is after its put in front of us. terrible stuff they are though, like a candy store long forgotten since the 1800s where all the sweets have been fermenting and stewing in large teak cabinets.
drink another beer in a G8 summit sculpture under the Brooklyn Bridge, all the personalities are there, en replica, but are three feet tall sitting cross legged in the grass. I only recognize Obama and Harper.
Subway to Brooklyn Heights around midnight monday find a place selling cheap eats and beers on a huge patio with umbrellas. I order a catfish taco, Cody, a hot dog. We then see people carrying these corn-like cobbed delicacies around. We order them too and devour them. I find out they are corn cobbs dipped in butter, then mayonnaise, then mexican cheese, cayene pepper and cilantro. Geeze! Oh and beers were only $2.00 for a Brooklyn IPA! Where can I get this in Vancouver?
no roaches tonight.
(Back to real time)
Children coughing, my bladder filling, been awake since 4am. Cody is in Kansas City. America is run on Dunkin. I hope I make it to San Francisco today.
wish me luck.
MoMA was a flash mob that looked more like shopping mall during boxing day than a world renowned modern art gallery featuring the world's greatest art collection. shuffling down escalators, flowing by duchamps in a flow of people, passing all the works that i've spent the passed two years studying in short glimpses, mostly obstructed by hands holding iphones and headsets reiterating the artists statement in every language. in a near panic, I meet up with cody to go for lunch.
get to central park and are now encircled in large black flies while we eat our warm prepackaged trader joes greek salad. at least we are out of the crowds. I think if I had to go down fifth avenue on a daily basis I would wear a robe of rubber snakes, or cover myself in powdered sugar to get people out of my way as I walked steadily down the street.
Go to the Central Park Zoo, its really old, to get away from the crowds and attempt to reconnect with nature. People are seen posing, pretending to put their arms around a snow leopard that sits behind a thick layer of, hopefully one way glass. It was the same way at MoMA, why do people pose in front of famous or strange things, like a Pollack or a Picasso with their thumbs up? They only recognize the paintings from tote bags sold at shopping centers around the continent. Or they don't even see the work in real time, through their own eyes, but through a computer screen that inherently brightens, contrasts and alters life.
buy the Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin at the MoMA bookstore.
We walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into DUMBO (Down under the Manhattan bridge overpass).
Find a great mexican place order long island ice teas. an older puerto rican woman, we name Rosa, is our amazing waitress. She randomly asks Cody if she liked French dressing, we aren't eating a salad. I question them about a particular mexican traditional drink on their menu, no one knows what it is, so they google on their phones, saying if anyone orders it they usually tell the customers they are out of it. Great and cheap place.
Walk down the street to a gastropub, order a beer pronounced Cezzane, like the painter, but is spelled Season. Its made of grains of paradise and is ruby red and delicious. We don't know what an old fashioned is, so we order it because its the only drink I can think of, and we both ask what it is after its put in front of us. terrible stuff they are though, like a candy store long forgotten since the 1800s where all the sweets have been fermenting and stewing in large teak cabinets.
drink another beer in a G8 summit sculpture under the Brooklyn Bridge, all the personalities are there, en replica, but are three feet tall sitting cross legged in the grass. I only recognize Obama and Harper.
Subway to Brooklyn Heights around midnight monday find a place selling cheap eats and beers on a huge patio with umbrellas. I order a catfish taco, Cody, a hot dog. We then see people carrying these corn-like cobbed delicacies around. We order them too and devour them. I find out they are corn cobbs dipped in butter, then mayonnaise, then mexican cheese, cayene pepper and cilantro. Geeze! Oh and beers were only $2.00 for a Brooklyn IPA! Where can I get this in Vancouver?
no roaches tonight.
(Back to real time)
Children coughing, my bladder filling, been awake since 4am. Cody is in Kansas City. America is run on Dunkin. I hope I make it to San Francisco today.
wish me luck.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
early, dark thunderstorms. lightning through the cracked curtain. mug quivered off the air conditioner unit smashing a glass of stale water. Dreams of long cement driveways in the suburbs with black dogs running every which way. Morning, pouring sopping rain, everything slow moving and soaked. Williamsburg streets, read about Rosanne Barr's anarchist nut farm in Hawaii and her attempts at running for President in 2012. She will make war illegal, marijuana legal, she states,
"Whatever I can't figure out, I'll get from big experts at MIT—people that have answers. I want 100 percent geniuses, no lobbyists. And 53 percent women, to reflect the character of the country. Also a lot of poor people. I'm thinking of voting an entirely new government in rather than be part of our crumbling, rotting, unfixable one."
Watched a woman with two legs as thin as train rails and very well groomed man standing and continuously drinking espresso after espresso and smoking a fresh package of Marlboros.
Cody and I wonder into an empty Indian Restaurant. A long hallway of a place with rose pink tablecloths, plastic pink chrysanthemums in plastic vases and pink napkins folded like turrets on each empty table setting. The waiter was always a stone-throw away with a pitcher of water filling my metal goblet after every sip.
The rain has started to seep into the subway stations from cracks in the ceiling, there is a river of brown chocolate colored water rushing over the tracks. workers are sweeping water into the tracks with brooms.
Triple shot of coffee under several globes floating in space at Atlas Triple Shot Cafe. Read and relax.
Kill another roach scurrying on the exposed brick wall.
"Whatever I can't figure out, I'll get from big experts at MIT—people that have answers. I want 100 percent geniuses, no lobbyists. And 53 percent women, to reflect the character of the country. Also a lot of poor people. I'm thinking of voting an entirely new government in rather than be part of our crumbling, rotting, unfixable one."
Watched a woman with two legs as thin as train rails and very well groomed man standing and continuously drinking espresso after espresso and smoking a fresh package of Marlboros.
Cody and I wonder into an empty Indian Restaurant. A long hallway of a place with rose pink tablecloths, plastic pink chrysanthemums in plastic vases and pink napkins folded like turrets on each empty table setting. The waiter was always a stone-throw away with a pitcher of water filling my metal goblet after every sip.
The rain has started to seep into the subway stations from cracks in the ceiling, there is a river of brown chocolate colored water rushing over the tracks. workers are sweeping water into the tracks with brooms.
Triple shot of coffee under several globes floating in space at Atlas Triple Shot Cafe. Read and relax.
Kill another roach scurrying on the exposed brick wall.
Monday, August 15, 2011
take the streets, lost, in search of the brooklyn flea market. end up in a rite-aid, a target, and a duane reade for cash, antibacterial handsoap, an energy drink and some terrible directions. Find the market that is two blocks up from where it was said to have been via their internet site. Lots of old vintage, new hand-crafted, and concocted foodstuffs. Come back to the house to have a rooftop bbq with mike, the apartment owner, and two of his russian friends. They are both recent immigrants that are looking for semi-permanent jobs and work visas. We talked about obtaining status, Moscow, and Visas, I had little input. They bbq chicken legs and these jerky-like pork bits that kept falling through the grill into the charcoals, covering them in this silty grey powder. Becka, was the dj, and he played very monotonous techno, that started off decent, but three hours of it in the baking sun was too much, but at least some of it was local, "holy ghosts" a band from brooklyn. Becka and Elaine, I believe her name was both live in Brighton beach, where apparently all the Russian Immigrants live. We summoned an excuse to depart this little european experience in brooklyn to be on our own.
We took the subway to get a view of the statue of liberty, and with it, large queues of overly tanned, urban outfitter-teenagers cheering and hollering at each other in line for the ellis island ferry. walked into ground zero where old yellow-haired women were seeing the sights through their digital camera screens that they held above their heads rather than through their eyes as their pink chewing gum poked through their lips as they chewed it with their front teeth, spinning in circles, pointing their cameras at the firemen that offered first hand experience of the events that happened that day nearly ten years ago.
We needed coffee. Walked through wall street to the subway uptown to greenwich. after hours of walking found this little italian place with burnt espresso but great carrot cake.
in the apartment, another roach slaughtered, and my favorite episode of seinfeld, "the pen" season three, episode three,
Stella!
We took the subway to get a view of the statue of liberty, and with it, large queues of overly tanned, urban outfitter-teenagers cheering and hollering at each other in line for the ellis island ferry. walked into ground zero where old yellow-haired women were seeing the sights through their digital camera screens that they held above their heads rather than through their eyes as their pink chewing gum poked through their lips as they chewed it with their front teeth, spinning in circles, pointing their cameras at the firemen that offered first hand experience of the events that happened that day nearly ten years ago.
We needed coffee. Walked through wall street to the subway uptown to greenwich. after hours of walking found this little italian place with burnt espresso but great carrot cake.
in the apartment, another roach slaughtered, and my favorite episode of seinfeld, "the pen" season three, episode three,
Stella!
Sunday, August 14, 2011
cody and i decided to go our separate ways today via foot. I left the apartment and immediately got lost in downtown brooklyn. After much useless walking to add to my mileage, I found the F train and went uptown to the International Center of Photography. Elliott Erwitt was on exhibition. His films were my favorite, one called Red White and Bluegrass, where he and Robert Frank visited the south and documented the old disappearing bluegrass in the deep south. Another documentary he made was called Beauty Knows no Pain, and featured an uptight, crazy old woman with cat-rimmed glasses with sparkles in Kilgore Texas from the mid 1960s who ran the cheerleading group called the Rangerettes:
Ate lunch in Bryant Park behind the main public library, with hundreds of others on little green chairs spread thin over a grassy field. Went to 5th ave to buy film, cheapest I've ever seen before. A package of five rolls of 120 film is $19.99, in Vancouver I pay $47.00
Walked down 5th ave passed ritzy shops and potential models (everyone here is so good looking and well dressed) to the Flat Iron building and district. Had a cigarette in Madison Park next to this giant white sculpture of someones face that looked like it was being stretched digitally on a computer screen. Back into Greenwich, passed the Big Lebowski store where the shop-owner sports a house-coat and slippers all day selling paraphernalia.
Met up with Cody in Washington Square Park where there sat this greying old hairy man melting into the park bench he sat on. He was enveloped in a static grey and black molten mass of moving shapes up to his neck, pigeons. He was encased with pigeons feeding them by splaying seed all over his body.
Go into Chinatown and walk along the historic Bowery to the New Museum. I'm late and talk my way into seeing the first floor of the exhibition for free. Later meander into a free Whole Foods craft beer tasting, get a bit tipsy from all the free beer. Meet with Cody and get a giant, giant slice of Pizza, and go to a show in Soho, Six Organs of Admittance, beautiful, yet too mellow and it was a late show that started late, so we had to leave around 2.
Back in the aparment, a giant cockroach is chased out from under our bed, into the bathroom, into the hallway, back into our bedroom, into the living room where it is smashed with Cody's sandal, meanwhile probably waking up our roommate from France who is leaving that morning.
These are real suckers, these roaches are the real deal.
Ate lunch in Bryant Park behind the main public library, with hundreds of others on little green chairs spread thin over a grassy field. Went to 5th ave to buy film, cheapest I've ever seen before. A package of five rolls of 120 film is $19.99, in Vancouver I pay $47.00
Walked down 5th ave passed ritzy shops and potential models (everyone here is so good looking and well dressed) to the Flat Iron building and district. Had a cigarette in Madison Park next to this giant white sculpture of someones face that looked like it was being stretched digitally on a computer screen. Back into Greenwich, passed the Big Lebowski store where the shop-owner sports a house-coat and slippers all day selling paraphernalia.
Met up with Cody in Washington Square Park where there sat this greying old hairy man melting into the park bench he sat on. He was enveloped in a static grey and black molten mass of moving shapes up to his neck, pigeons. He was encased with pigeons feeding them by splaying seed all over his body.
Go into Chinatown and walk along the historic Bowery to the New Museum. I'm late and talk my way into seeing the first floor of the exhibition for free. Later meander into a free Whole Foods craft beer tasting, get a bit tipsy from all the free beer. Meet with Cody and get a giant, giant slice of Pizza, and go to a show in Soho, Six Organs of Admittance, beautiful, yet too mellow and it was a late show that started late, so we had to leave around 2.
Back in the aparment, a giant cockroach is chased out from under our bed, into the bathroom, into the hallway, back into our bedroom, into the living room where it is smashed with Cody's sandal, meanwhile probably waking up our roommate from France who is leaving that morning.
These are real suckers, these roaches are the real deal.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Take an old gondola from on top of the Queensboro bridge through the city, as high as the skyscrapers over to Roosevelt Island. Same system as on Grouse Mountain, but this one is $2 for a ride rather than $20. Wander around the island, 800 feet wide and two miles long, known as Welfare island at one time, boasts one dilapidated building that might be a hospital dedicated to small pox victims that I read about. But its mostly this strange island of new communistic-like condos and people in wheelchairs with breathing aids and feeding tubes. One out of five people had to have been in a wheelchair. Ate lunch overlooking the East River and the East Village of Manhattan. Saw a make shift photo shoot, the photographer an early twenty something, overweight, his pants falling down in back revealing too much, with a bright orange bath towel covering his face and camera from the sun, the model, a bundle of sun-browned sticks placed in a diagonal against a cement planter, good dappled lighting, however.
Subway to Williamsburg-er, for a chocolate banana milkshake. Start to feel a bit ill, sit amidst the sunset overlooking, once again, the east river and Manhattan.
Home and sleep.
Subway to Williamsburg-er, for a chocolate banana milkshake. Start to feel a bit ill, sit amidst the sunset overlooking, once again, the east river and Manhattan.
Home and sleep.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
wtf coffee laboratory for morning cold brew, into the eighties by this point. cafe where science and coffee collide, at times it takes up to 10 minutes to make a coffee with beakers, a lab coat, and long metal tongs. take a broiler train to 81st, no air conditioning. the sweat on my chest pools in small cluster-like cesspools through my white shirt as my cup of ice melts in minutes over my leg that offers little to no relief. my thoughts are slowed and bewildered.
natural history museum. scads of children in uniform colors from various elementary schools all holding hands like little wrecking balls catapulting each other through the halls. the worlds oldest sycamore tree cutaway, like the scene from vertigo; I mapped my life, a life-size replica of a blue whale, the largest and loudest animal to ever exist on the earth suspended from the ceiling, and an eerie corner where lights were off, and only a few people were meandering, exhibited a frightening scene of a sperm whale attacking a giant squid in the depths of of ocean, a scene made famous from the film The Squid and the Whale.
Headed to the planetarium to be guided through the cosmos 13.4 billion years ago with Whoopi Goldberg and a few crying infants. The foodcourt was an exhibit all to itself, occupying nearly an entire floor with foodstuffs ranging from comfort food, mexican, quick bites, Italian, to gourmet cupcakes, it demonstrated extreme amounts of wealth, gluttony, and what confined, panic-stricken, low-blood sugared mammals of the homo-sapiens do in a food frenzy.
stumptown coffee at a place in soho!
flash forward to a bombardment of senses in times square. I probably ended up in over 40 different family snapshot photographs.
Headed back to Soho to the International Film Cinema to see the late screening of The Future.
Figuring out how to get home for 45 minutes in the subway system as a Chinese duo play overly dramatic music on an authentic stringed instrument.
Get back to Green point and eat cereal on the roof at 2:30 am. locate the familiar city constellation, the big dipper.
natural history museum. scads of children in uniform colors from various elementary schools all holding hands like little wrecking balls catapulting each other through the halls. the worlds oldest sycamore tree cutaway, like the scene from vertigo; I mapped my life, a life-size replica of a blue whale, the largest and loudest animal to ever exist on the earth suspended from the ceiling, and an eerie corner where lights were off, and only a few people were meandering, exhibited a frightening scene of a sperm whale attacking a giant squid in the depths of of ocean, a scene made famous from the film The Squid and the Whale.
Headed to the planetarium to be guided through the cosmos 13.4 billion years ago with Whoopi Goldberg and a few crying infants. The foodcourt was an exhibit all to itself, occupying nearly an entire floor with foodstuffs ranging from comfort food, mexican, quick bites, Italian, to gourmet cupcakes, it demonstrated extreme amounts of wealth, gluttony, and what confined, panic-stricken, low-blood sugared mammals of the homo-sapiens do in a food frenzy.
stumptown coffee at a place in soho!
flash forward to a bombardment of senses in times square. I probably ended up in over 40 different family snapshot photographs.
Headed back to Soho to the International Film Cinema to see the late screening of The Future.
Figuring out how to get home for 45 minutes in the subway system as a Chinese duo play overly dramatic music on an authentic stringed instrument.
Get back to Green point and eat cereal on the roof at 2:30 am. locate the familiar city constellation, the big dipper.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
botox in your balls
get into seatac around one in the morning. two backpacks on, both chest and front covered. the airport is dead, no flights in or out until 5. go through security and down to our terminal.
find some armless black chairs hiding behind an abandoned shoe shine station, watch several episodes of 21 jump street well into 3:30 when we decide to attempt to sleep. sprawled out on a shoe polished-stained carpet under heavy fluorescent lights we attempt to sleep with shirts over our faces, but spend the time hearing enclosing beeps coming from a broken people-mover. Time passes, a flight that seems to be from the southeast or east-coast (based on the attire and the time difference- everyone was quite perky) and i watch from under the cover of my t-shirt cow-boy boots, flip flops, and slippers trot on through into the soundless abyss of empty waiting rooms.
Time lingers into the morning and crowds pour in, almost at once, most waiting for the doors to open at a starbucks, including a man whose physique is like that of a standing polar bear, only he was carting a flat of Tillamook cheese.
Got to our terminal along with 20 some odd other stand-by travelers wanting to snag a ticket on a sold-out flight. No more flights until the day after.
Downtown Seattle we end up on a bus darting through a subway tunnel under the depths of the city. A man drinking coffee, his jaw hanging open for the twenty minutes we were traveling, his head bobbing here and there from monday morning tiredness. tattoo'ed onto his knuckles "game over". Very confused and slightly delirious.
Find an amazing breakfast place called oddfellows in capital hill, good eats and a treasure trove of great artifacts. behind us a woman talking to herself, eventually gets herself thrown out.
finally make it to kansas city, after being awake for some 40 odd hours. wake up call for 445am for a continental breakfast of biscuits and gravy with orange juice. hands swabbed at the airport for god knows what.
new york is humid. our neighborhood sketchy. a woman with a nickel in her ear, little quantity of teeth, and 4 foot 8 was peering into the window as we ate egg and plantain sandwiches dripping in sweat.
pouring rain, totally impressed that I am functioning off that 4 hours of sleep in nearly 70 hours.
"botox in your balls will stop them from sweating" -overhead in Greenwich Village.
find some armless black chairs hiding behind an abandoned shoe shine station, watch several episodes of 21 jump street well into 3:30 when we decide to attempt to sleep. sprawled out on a shoe polished-stained carpet under heavy fluorescent lights we attempt to sleep with shirts over our faces, but spend the time hearing enclosing beeps coming from a broken people-mover. Time passes, a flight that seems to be from the southeast or east-coast (based on the attire and the time difference- everyone was quite perky) and i watch from under the cover of my t-shirt cow-boy boots, flip flops, and slippers trot on through into the soundless abyss of empty waiting rooms.
Time lingers into the morning and crowds pour in, almost at once, most waiting for the doors to open at a starbucks, including a man whose physique is like that of a standing polar bear, only he was carting a flat of Tillamook cheese.
Got to our terminal along with 20 some odd other stand-by travelers wanting to snag a ticket on a sold-out flight. No more flights until the day after.
Downtown Seattle we end up on a bus darting through a subway tunnel under the depths of the city. A man drinking coffee, his jaw hanging open for the twenty minutes we were traveling, his head bobbing here and there from monday morning tiredness. tattoo'ed onto his knuckles "game over". Very confused and slightly delirious.
Find an amazing breakfast place called oddfellows in capital hill, good eats and a treasure trove of great artifacts. behind us a woman talking to herself, eventually gets herself thrown out.
finally make it to kansas city, after being awake for some 40 odd hours. wake up call for 445am for a continental breakfast of biscuits and gravy with orange juice. hands swabbed at the airport for god knows what.
new york is humid. our neighborhood sketchy. a woman with a nickel in her ear, little quantity of teeth, and 4 foot 8 was peering into the window as we ate egg and plantain sandwiches dripping in sweat.
pouring rain, totally impressed that I am functioning off that 4 hours of sleep in nearly 70 hours.
"botox in your balls will stop them from sweating" -overhead in Greenwich Village.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
SAGITTARIUS (November 22-December 21): I think of you as the quintessential explorer of our zodiac, Sagittarius… with the keenest enthusiasm for all you've yet to be exposed to, and the harshest dislike for that soul-sucking disease known as boredom. Life is too short not to experience something new on a very regular basis, right? You're headed into a month or so during which the call to explore is beckoning you in a louder-than-usual voice… and for no other reason than to ensure you haven't fallen into any sort of spirit-debilitating slump. You need an outlet for the burgeoning restlessness, preferably one that doesn't involve pushing anyone's buttons nor making a stink in workplace settings. A weekend adventure would certainly qualify, as does indulging any of your myriad curiosities about outdoor activities you've never tried, topics of study you haven't delved into deeply enough, angles of self-exploration you've yet to approach, or other cultures or subcultures that you'd like to learn more about. Before those dreaded words 'I'm bored' ever have a chance to cross your lips, treat yourself to a revitalizing exploration.
read yours
read yours
Friday, July 22, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Aground: Photo Center of the NW.
&
a new religion: "pastafarian" who belong to The church of the flying spaghetti monster.
&
a new religion: "pastafarian" who belong to The church of the flying spaghetti monster.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
dough.
it was early evening, summer, it rained earlier, so the tarmac was still wet as the sun was being cooled by large grey clouds. I was sitting on a bench a few yards from the front door of the presentation house gallery, taking a coffee; a latte actually, when I saw a woman with long grey and black- salt and pepper hair, wearing a bright orange dress, a red t-shirt with the number 31, and a green draw-string back pack, holding a crunched up dominos pizza box who was approaching me. in all, she resembled an over-sized child in her late forties. sure enough she sat down beside me. i didn't notice she was also carrying a black, well over-ripened banana in her other hand. i then peeped through the corner of my glasses what she was doing with that old greasy pizza box, and saw her open it. It was full crumbled, expired pita or naan bread. she then surreptitiously squeezed the mushy banana into the bits of bread and started kneeding them together for several minutes.
"are those clarks" she asked me pointing at my feet.
"yeah, they are. they're comfortable" I replied.
she told me how she used to wear them in france, but couldn't find them here. I told her I bought them in portland. she has a friend who drove an orange hippie van all over oregon.
our conversation about footwear ended, and she got up with her doughy banana mixture, carrying it with that pizza box and went by the chestnut tree and plopped it in one big bunch underneath it, right by the trunk, and walked off.
"are those clarks" she asked me pointing at my feet.
"yeah, they are. they're comfortable" I replied.
she told me how she used to wear them in france, but couldn't find them here. I told her I bought them in portland. she has a friend who drove an orange hippie van all over oregon.
our conversation about footwear ended, and she got up with her doughy banana mixture, carrying it with that pizza box and went by the chestnut tree and plopped it in one big bunch underneath it, right by the trunk, and walked off.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
champions
Pigmy Pouter, Yellow.
The Champions of the National Pigeon Association circa 2009.
See more here.
Thanks Cody Rocko for knowing I would love this.
See more here.
Thanks Cody Rocko for knowing I would love this.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
we require some form of culture in our society to inhibit rioting. this is culture. (theres no riots in North Korea)
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
What are you searching for?
BR: "...What are you really searching for?"
...
AS: "What I'm searching for is two totally conflicting things: to be totally alone and content by myself, but loved and adored by millions of people. And know it."
From Here to There: Alec Soth's America
...
AS: "What I'm searching for is two totally conflicting things: to be totally alone and content by myself, but loved and adored by millions of people. And know it."
From Here to There: Alec Soth's America
Sunday, June 12, 2011
160 vancouver
riding a suburban bus into the city saturday, just after midnight. it was empty, I had my eyes shut, I was listening to my mind. We were in a long stretch of forested highway with numbered streets and streets named after gas stations, when a group of nearly one hundred teenagers were waiting at the "7500 block" bus station. When they started clambering on board, I noticed they were all wet, their new clothes sucked to their skins as their feet sloshed in their shoes. They were so aflame and animated as they spoke a dialect of spanish or mexican that the little amount of fortitude I had left was brought forthright with a cringe. My headphones were used along with loud Black Mountain to abate the quick slashes of yelling spanish, soggy jeans rubbing together, and my eyes shut yet again, to blanket the sight of braces interlocking with tongues and peach-fuzz mustaches as some of these wet sprites "made out."
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Monday, June 6, 2011
"horse herpes forces kids to ride stick ponies"
"Vancouver: Come for the film tax credits, stay for the marijuana!"
summer is near make some slaw:
"Vancouver: Come for the film tax credits, stay for the marijuana!"
summer is near make some slaw:
Thursday, June 2, 2011
on automobiles and the human race:
"How are mere men to deal with mechanical commotion that is both of their own creation and seemingly beyond their control?"
"Man now takes for granted the courage it takes to get behind the wheel of an automobile"
"For a man in his automobile trapped in a traffic jam, there are no easy answers"
"Close your eyes, and even the sea sounds like traffic"
-exerts from Conductors of the Moving World by Brad Zellar
published by Little Brown Mushroom
"Man now takes for granted the courage it takes to get behind the wheel of an automobile"
"For a man in his automobile trapped in a traffic jam, there are no easy answers"
"Close your eyes, and even the sea sounds like traffic"
-exerts from Conductors of the Moving World by Brad Zellar
published by Little Brown Mushroom
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
OWNing Fame
an essay I wrote comparing Andy Warhol and Oprah Winfrey:
Andy Warhol and Oprah Winfrey are both individuals who turned their work and their lives into a business. Through the process of exploiting the boundaries between art and marketing, identifying with and speaking the language of mass culture, and carefully constructing their own image to be readily consumed en masse, these two entrepreneurs were able to amass a tremendous amount of power and influence over their followers, and to some degree eventually dictate their lives. Oprah’s biography has become a consumable public text written in collaboration with her guests on The Oprah Winfrey Show in order to highlight nuances within her life and those of her audience bringing herself down to their level to increase the level of viewership. Warhol’s constructed self-image can be seen through the work he made titled, Screen Tests. Screen Tests is a formulaic, motion-picture portrait project that involves filming approximately four-hudred and seventy-two individuals by placing a video camera in front of a subject and leaving them up to their own devices to be caught on film for three minutes. We see how they react to the hot lights on their face, to what is happening around them in the Factory, and to the realization that their performance will observed in the future, all the while being reduced to his or her own image. When screening the films, Warhol slowed them down so each filmed portrait had a duration of four minutes, providing a much more intimate appreciation of the subject than a traditional portrait could attest. The Screen Tests in their totality comprise of all the individuals living in and around New York’s underground art scene, and are as much a portrait of them as it is a portrait of the artist, whose constructed public persona is a composite of all these individuals found at the Factory.
As with much of Warhol’s work, especially in Screen Tests, Warhol is steeped in the ideologies of commercial art, brazenly merging an order of business and marketing (with inherent links to capital), to his art and his life. At a time when it wasn’t necessarily “hip” to care about money; with the rise of countercultures of the 1960’s that intentionally attacked authority and hierarchies that instilled the monetary system, Warhol sought to act upon this rejection by intentionally making art that was marketable to individuals; and what better than a series of portraits. Warhol saw no boundary between art and business, where “...making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art” (Warhol, 28). This exemplifies the idea that art is a marketplace and to succeed one needs a business; this Warhol and Oprah Winfrey alike, were able to establish early on in their careers. Their lives have been a personally designed and intentional process, mimicking that of a business; depicting their lives as their work, art, and their brand, enabled “in controlling the interpretation of [their] own work” (Crow, 50) to best suit the market. If Oprah “lost control of the business, [she’d] lose [her]self - or at least the ability to be [her]self,” this exemplifies this notion of striving to transform ones life into a business-like machine or factory, where “owning [one]self is a way to be [one]self” (Illouz, 59). This is apparent when we consider the title of her new network that launched this month, titled, “OWN,” (The Oprah Winfrey Network); a title that boasts dominance and power over her business, her life, and “Oprah’s All Stars,” (the personalities of Dr. Phil, Suzie Orman, and Dr. Oz) that function as the primary foundation of this network, that are only a snippet of Oprah’s collection of individuals. Warhol’s use of the Screen Tests is interesting, in that he transforms the screening of the film into a form of self-promotion, for instance, when he was showing “13 Most Beautiful Women” an already flattering title for those women in the film, at the socially sophisticate’s home of Sally Kirkland, the fashion editor of Life Magazine, thirteen would sometimes elevate to twenty most beautiful women depending on who was in the audience, or who Warhol wanted to please to strengthen relationships sometimes in hopes to sell a new painting. The titles of the Screen Tests, “13 Most Beautiful Women,” “13 Most Beautiful Boys,” “50 Fantastics,” “50 Personailities,” were guidelines and categories to aim for while shooting, yet they were not fixed and the subjects in them were interchangeable. Warhol’s “metamorphosis into a pop persona was calculated and deliberate” (Bouron, 12) turning his life, like Oprah, into a performance, with staged emotions for the service and utilization of those around them, all the while merging their private lives with the public. The participants in Screen Tests, and the subjects on The Oprah Winfrey Show, can be seen in some ways as a portrait of the artist, as it shows off the breadth of friendships, connections, interests, egalitarianism, opportunism, and an eye for beauty in Warhol’s case. But for Oprah, some of her subjects are stricken with domestic violence, alienation in African American culture, and issues of weight, which are all subjects Oprah has dealt with personally and has shared with the general public. Through this calculated sharing of their private lives, be it a violent past, issues with appearance (both Oprah and Warhol openly shared their distastes with their visage, be it their weight, acne or a misshapen nose) their lives are exhibited for a public understanding and consumption, all the while attaining more followers.
This mirroring structure between Oprah and Warhol’s biography and that of their guests, or participants in their work, is based on more than just similarities; it extends into a highly symbiotic relationship where Oprah and Warhol rely on their subjects for material just as much as their subjects rely on them to assemble their image and story within mass culture; done through a process of commodification. Oprah has “packaged and commodified her own life in a way that resonated with the construction and packaging of her guest’s lives,” (17) in that, she has been able to turn her guest’s biographies into encased entities, commodities for public consumption. These commodified biographies “are the flesh and blood that have helped constitute Oprah Winfrey’s phenomenal wealth” (Illouz, 218) and demonstrate her reliance on her audience as much as they respond to her. A similar exchange is apparent when looking at Warhol’s Screen Tests, where the sheer amount of “glamour conferred by being in a Warhol film enticed even more people to sit for him” (Huxley, 9) allowing Warhol to amass his collection of personalities. However, Warhol’s use of his Screen Tests that featured individuals found traipsing around the Factory; ranging from hustlers, homosexuals, and drag queens to drug users, writers and musicians, critically subverted traditional notions of mass culture, by being “unified in [their] resistance to the normalizing, disciplinary regime of respectable, heterosexual, middle- and upper-class society” (Siegel, 10) through alternative ways of thinking, working and being that was for-fronted in the ideologies of the personalities Warhol chose to film. Warhol recognized that “contemporary American culture was rooted in appearance, novelty , and conspicuous consumption,” (Morris, 14) and he exercised all of these notions within his Screen Tests by highlighting his sitter’s image through the dialogue of portraiture, one that guarantees repeat customers and is based on a system of consumerism. Oprah too, is aware of the desires of mass culture, and has “used several devices to make the audience a structural component of the genre” of her show. By giving people a voice that would otherwise not be heard, and by focusing on the problems of her guests in the hopes that they may resonate with her viewers; “she has made the audience the main trope of her show” (Illouz, 56), and her main customer. This consumer exchange between artist and public exists as both artists commodified their own lives and work and took on the role of the producer and distributor within the commodification exchange system. Warhol under the Factory, a title that blatantly references the location where goods are manufactured and distributed, and Oprah under her first network titled “Harpo” (Oprah backwards) and more recently “Own;” Oprah “emerged as arbiter of American Culture, [and] Harpo a money machine.” (Brands, 301). By employing the power of their image as celebrity within mass media, and by escalating their aura of celebrity onto those around them, gave rise to a dependable amount of followers that would seek the two out for their own transformation.
There is a reason why one can find Warhol knock-offs at dollar stores and on greeting-cards, and why everyone knows what books America will be reading next, because both Oprah and Warhol knew the operations of mass culture and succumbed to its power, using their privileged position as celebrity to transform social types and their image into marketable global products. Warhol seemed to have the ability to take the “image of a mere mortal and thus morph said human into the ranks of the legendary gods and goddesses of the silver-screen” (Sokolowski) through the use of his Screen Tests and his somewhat mythic persona that he created and distributed amongst the media. His “urge to collect images of the rich and famous” while incorporating more people into his art than any other contemporary artist, “can be seen as an effort to grasp hold of fame for himself” (Morris, 11) while transforming wanna-bees into superstars. Much like Warhol’s subjects, Oprah’s guests are motivated to talk and be seen “by the desire to have the requisite fifteen minutes of fame” that being on the screen provides, yet they are also attempting “to achieve the (false) promises of self-change” (Illouz, 120) that being on a talk show is supposed to fulfill. However, most talk shows, Oprah’s included, give prominence to human suffering as a way to endear audiences’ sympathies, humanist connections and a distorted interest in the disadvantaged, while exploiting and manipulating human distress for their own profit. This demonstrates Oprah’s acceptance into mass culture by giving her audience what they want while securing her enterprise financially. Part of the artistic production of Warhol’s Factory was a “commitment of Warhol and his superstars to a project of aesthetically and erotically publicizing their way of life” (Siegel, 13), by filming mundane tasks caught on film, from attempting to not blink for three minutes, brushing ones teeth rather sexually, to drinking soda, elevating these rather banal tasks into ones that are much more sublime in nature. These simple actions are congruent with Warhol’s banal paintings of consumer culture that aim “to be recognized as stylish icons of American life,” (Huxley, 8) elevating the mundane through an accentuated quality on film, an affiliation with Warhol, or through the power of celebrity into the realm of the sublime. Oprah too, has the power to create icons of American culture. She converts novels and self-help books that are of interest to her into bestsellers. By raising them to the status of Oprah’s Book Club not only dictates what the nation will be reading, but guarantees that upwards of 50,000 more books of each title will be sold and talked about amidst mainstream culture. The glorification of the everyday that Warhol gives his subjects, celebrities, superstars in his Screen Tests, plays into the American psyche; the “desire, pervasive in society at large, to glimpse at both the outer appearance and the private lives of celebrities” (Wolf, 62) to find correlations between the lives of celebrities and that of their own. It was Warhol who said “the President of the United States and Liz Taylor drank Coke, and so could you,” (Warhol, 13) bringing the level of celebrity down from high-culture into pop-culture, while alleging that anyone could be the next celebrity using Warhol as a conduit for their stardom. It was through submitting themselves to mass culture and including their audience and subjects in their own image of celebrity that enabled both Warhol and Oprah to become such prominent and consumed figures of American Culture.
Warhol played into, yet brilliantly critiqued America’s obsession with fame and success through the types of individuals he was elevating into stardom; homosexuals, drag-queens, underground musicians, poets, free-thinkers, and criminals (“13 Most Wanted Men”), individuals who would not regularly be sought after in society especially this soon after the age of McCarthyism with its instilled conservatism still be felt throughout the country. It was through a process of not censoring or creating hierarchies, of tolerating every performance and gesture put forward that Warhol was able to bridge the gaps between surface and depth, art and life and more importantly, between high society and the underworld. It was Warhol’s series “13 Most Beautiful Women” that were more widely received than his “13 Most Beautiful Boys,” showing that the celebration of female beauty was a much more accepted route within mass culture. Warhol thus established himself as the promoter and judge of beauty and fantastic personalities, just like Oprah who took it on herself to become a judge of good books, food, vacations, and other consumer goods; making her the ultimate distribution model. A recent trip made by The Oprah Winfrey Show, where Oprah and 302 of her “ultimate fans” were broadcasted in Australia, caused tourism to rise in that country to rise by 5%. The Australian Tourism Industry says it is part of “The Oprah Effect,” or “The Million Dollar Touch” as CNBC calls it, where Oprah’s power of persuasion has been proven to govern the thoughts, motives and actions of millions of people.
Andy Warhol and Oprah Winfrey are both individuals who turned their work and their lives into a business. Through the process of exploiting the boundaries between art and marketing, identifying with and speaking the language of mass culture, and carefully constructing their own image to be readily consumed en masse, these two entrepreneurs were able to amass a tremendous amount of power and influence over their followers, and to some degree eventually dictate their lives. Oprah’s biography has become a consumable public text written in collaboration with her guests on The Oprah Winfrey Show in order to highlight nuances within her life and those of her audience bringing herself down to their level to increase the level of viewership. Warhol’s constructed self-image can be seen through the work he made titled, Screen Tests. Screen Tests is a formulaic, motion-picture portrait project that involves filming approximately four-hudred and seventy-two individuals by placing a video camera in front of a subject and leaving them up to their own devices to be caught on film for three minutes. We see how they react to the hot lights on their face, to what is happening around them in the Factory, and to the realization that their performance will observed in the future, all the while being reduced to his or her own image. When screening the films, Warhol slowed them down so each filmed portrait had a duration of four minutes, providing a much more intimate appreciation of the subject than a traditional portrait could attest. The Screen Tests in their totality comprise of all the individuals living in and around New York’s underground art scene, and are as much a portrait of them as it is a portrait of the artist, whose constructed public persona is a composite of all these individuals found at the Factory.
As with much of Warhol’s work, especially in Screen Tests, Warhol is steeped in the ideologies of commercial art, brazenly merging an order of business and marketing (with inherent links to capital), to his art and his life. At a time when it wasn’t necessarily “hip” to care about money; with the rise of countercultures of the 1960’s that intentionally attacked authority and hierarchies that instilled the monetary system, Warhol sought to act upon this rejection by intentionally making art that was marketable to individuals; and what better than a series of portraits. Warhol saw no boundary between art and business, where “...making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art” (Warhol, 28). This exemplifies the idea that art is a marketplace and to succeed one needs a business; this Warhol and Oprah Winfrey alike, were able to establish early on in their careers. Their lives have been a personally designed and intentional process, mimicking that of a business; depicting their lives as their work, art, and their brand, enabled “in controlling the interpretation of [their] own work” (Crow, 50) to best suit the market. If Oprah “lost control of the business, [she’d] lose [her]self - or at least the ability to be [her]self,” this exemplifies this notion of striving to transform ones life into a business-like machine or factory, where “owning [one]self is a way to be [one]self” (Illouz, 59). This is apparent when we consider the title of her new network that launched this month, titled, “OWN,” (The Oprah Winfrey Network); a title that boasts dominance and power over her business, her life, and “Oprah’s All Stars,” (the personalities of Dr. Phil, Suzie Orman, and Dr. Oz) that function as the primary foundation of this network, that are only a snippet of Oprah’s collection of individuals. Warhol’s use of the Screen Tests is interesting, in that he transforms the screening of the film into a form of self-promotion, for instance, when he was showing “13 Most Beautiful Women” an already flattering title for those women in the film, at the socially sophisticate’s home of Sally Kirkland, the fashion editor of Life Magazine, thirteen would sometimes elevate to twenty most beautiful women depending on who was in the audience, or who Warhol wanted to please to strengthen relationships sometimes in hopes to sell a new painting. The titles of the Screen Tests, “13 Most Beautiful Women,” “13 Most Beautiful Boys,” “50 Fantastics,” “50 Personailities,” were guidelines and categories to aim for while shooting, yet they were not fixed and the subjects in them were interchangeable. Warhol’s “metamorphosis into a pop persona was calculated and deliberate” (Bouron, 12) turning his life, like Oprah, into a performance, with staged emotions for the service and utilization of those around them, all the while merging their private lives with the public. The participants in Screen Tests, and the subjects on The Oprah Winfrey Show, can be seen in some ways as a portrait of the artist, as it shows off the breadth of friendships, connections, interests, egalitarianism, opportunism, and an eye for beauty in Warhol’s case. But for Oprah, some of her subjects are stricken with domestic violence, alienation in African American culture, and issues of weight, which are all subjects Oprah has dealt with personally and has shared with the general public. Through this calculated sharing of their private lives, be it a violent past, issues with appearance (both Oprah and Warhol openly shared their distastes with their visage, be it their weight, acne or a misshapen nose) their lives are exhibited for a public understanding and consumption, all the while attaining more followers.
This mirroring structure between Oprah and Warhol’s biography and that of their guests, or participants in their work, is based on more than just similarities; it extends into a highly symbiotic relationship where Oprah and Warhol rely on their subjects for material just as much as their subjects rely on them to assemble their image and story within mass culture; done through a process of commodification. Oprah has “packaged and commodified her own life in a way that resonated with the construction and packaging of her guest’s lives,” (17) in that, she has been able to turn her guest’s biographies into encased entities, commodities for public consumption. These commodified biographies “are the flesh and blood that have helped constitute Oprah Winfrey’s phenomenal wealth” (Illouz, 218) and demonstrate her reliance on her audience as much as they respond to her. A similar exchange is apparent when looking at Warhol’s Screen Tests, where the sheer amount of “glamour conferred by being in a Warhol film enticed even more people to sit for him” (Huxley, 9) allowing Warhol to amass his collection of personalities. However, Warhol’s use of his Screen Tests that featured individuals found traipsing around the Factory; ranging from hustlers, homosexuals, and drag queens to drug users, writers and musicians, critically subverted traditional notions of mass culture, by being “unified in [their] resistance to the normalizing, disciplinary regime of respectable, heterosexual, middle- and upper-class society” (Siegel, 10) through alternative ways of thinking, working and being that was for-fronted in the ideologies of the personalities Warhol chose to film. Warhol recognized that “contemporary American culture was rooted in appearance, novelty , and conspicuous consumption,” (Morris, 14) and he exercised all of these notions within his Screen Tests by highlighting his sitter’s image through the dialogue of portraiture, one that guarantees repeat customers and is based on a system of consumerism. Oprah too, is aware of the desires of mass culture, and has “used several devices to make the audience a structural component of the genre” of her show. By giving people a voice that would otherwise not be heard, and by focusing on the problems of her guests in the hopes that they may resonate with her viewers; “she has made the audience the main trope of her show” (Illouz, 56), and her main customer. This consumer exchange between artist and public exists as both artists commodified their own lives and work and took on the role of the producer and distributor within the commodification exchange system. Warhol under the Factory, a title that blatantly references the location where goods are manufactured and distributed, and Oprah under her first network titled “Harpo” (Oprah backwards) and more recently “Own;” Oprah “emerged as arbiter of American Culture, [and] Harpo a money machine.” (Brands, 301). By employing the power of their image as celebrity within mass media, and by escalating their aura of celebrity onto those around them, gave rise to a dependable amount of followers that would seek the two out for their own transformation.
There is a reason why one can find Warhol knock-offs at dollar stores and on greeting-cards, and why everyone knows what books America will be reading next, because both Oprah and Warhol knew the operations of mass culture and succumbed to its power, using their privileged position as celebrity to transform social types and their image into marketable global products. Warhol seemed to have the ability to take the “image of a mere mortal and thus morph said human into the ranks of the legendary gods and goddesses of the silver-screen” (Sokolowski) through the use of his Screen Tests and his somewhat mythic persona that he created and distributed amongst the media. His “urge to collect images of the rich and famous” while incorporating more people into his art than any other contemporary artist, “can be seen as an effort to grasp hold of fame for himself” (Morris, 11) while transforming wanna-bees into superstars. Much like Warhol’s subjects, Oprah’s guests are motivated to talk and be seen “by the desire to have the requisite fifteen minutes of fame” that being on the screen provides, yet they are also attempting “to achieve the (false) promises of self-change” (Illouz, 120) that being on a talk show is supposed to fulfill. However, most talk shows, Oprah’s included, give prominence to human suffering as a way to endear audiences’ sympathies, humanist connections and a distorted interest in the disadvantaged, while exploiting and manipulating human distress for their own profit. This demonstrates Oprah’s acceptance into mass culture by giving her audience what they want while securing her enterprise financially. Part of the artistic production of Warhol’s Factory was a “commitment of Warhol and his superstars to a project of aesthetically and erotically publicizing their way of life” (Siegel, 13), by filming mundane tasks caught on film, from attempting to not blink for three minutes, brushing ones teeth rather sexually, to drinking soda, elevating these rather banal tasks into ones that are much more sublime in nature. These simple actions are congruent with Warhol’s banal paintings of consumer culture that aim “to be recognized as stylish icons of American life,” (Huxley, 8) elevating the mundane through an accentuated quality on film, an affiliation with Warhol, or through the power of celebrity into the realm of the sublime. Oprah too, has the power to create icons of American culture. She converts novels and self-help books that are of interest to her into bestsellers. By raising them to the status of Oprah’s Book Club not only dictates what the nation will be reading, but guarantees that upwards of 50,000 more books of each title will be sold and talked about amidst mainstream culture. The glorification of the everyday that Warhol gives his subjects, celebrities, superstars in his Screen Tests, plays into the American psyche; the “desire, pervasive in society at large, to glimpse at both the outer appearance and the private lives of celebrities” (Wolf, 62) to find correlations between the lives of celebrities and that of their own. It was Warhol who said “the President of the United States and Liz Taylor drank Coke, and so could you,” (Warhol, 13) bringing the level of celebrity down from high-culture into pop-culture, while alleging that anyone could be the next celebrity using Warhol as a conduit for their stardom. It was through submitting themselves to mass culture and including their audience and subjects in their own image of celebrity that enabled both Warhol and Oprah to become such prominent and consumed figures of American Culture.
Warhol played into, yet brilliantly critiqued America’s obsession with fame and success through the types of individuals he was elevating into stardom; homosexuals, drag-queens, underground musicians, poets, free-thinkers, and criminals (“13 Most Wanted Men”), individuals who would not regularly be sought after in society especially this soon after the age of McCarthyism with its instilled conservatism still be felt throughout the country. It was through a process of not censoring or creating hierarchies, of tolerating every performance and gesture put forward that Warhol was able to bridge the gaps between surface and depth, art and life and more importantly, between high society and the underworld. It was Warhol’s series “13 Most Beautiful Women” that were more widely received than his “13 Most Beautiful Boys,” showing that the celebration of female beauty was a much more accepted route within mass culture. Warhol thus established himself as the promoter and judge of beauty and fantastic personalities, just like Oprah who took it on herself to become a judge of good books, food, vacations, and other consumer goods; making her the ultimate distribution model. A recent trip made by The Oprah Winfrey Show, where Oprah and 302 of her “ultimate fans” were broadcasted in Australia, caused tourism to rise in that country to rise by 5%. The Australian Tourism Industry says it is part of “The Oprah Effect,” or “The Million Dollar Touch” as CNBC calls it, where Oprah’s power of persuasion has been proven to govern the thoughts, motives and actions of millions of people.
Works Cited
Crow, Thomas. Modern Art in the Common Culture. Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol. New Haven, CT. Yale University Press, 1996.
Huxley, Geralyn. From Stills to Motion & Back Again. Fantastics & Personalities. Vancouver, BC. Presentation House Gallery, 2003.
Illouz, Eva. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery. New York, Columbia University Press, 2003.
Morris, L. Laura. Andy Warhol. Celebrities, More than Fifteen Minutes. The Paradox of Andy Warhol. Las Vegas NV. PaperBall, 2003.
Brands, W. H. Masters of Enterprise. The Celebrity as Entrepreneur. New York, NY. The Free Press, 1999.
Siegel, Marc. “Doing It For Andy.” Art Journal. Vol. 62, No. 1, (Spring, 2003). College Art Association.
Wolf, Reva. “Collaboration as Social Exchange: Screen Tests/A Diary by Gerrard Malanga and Andy Warhol” Art Journal. Vol. 52, No. 4, Interactions Between Artists and Writers. (Winter, 1993) College Art Association.
Crow, Thomas. Modern Art in the Common Culture. Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol. New Haven, CT. Yale University Press, 1996.
Huxley, Geralyn. From Stills to Motion & Back Again. Fantastics & Personalities. Vancouver, BC. Presentation House Gallery, 2003.
Illouz, Eva. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery. New York, Columbia University Press, 2003.
Morris, L. Laura. Andy Warhol. Celebrities, More than Fifteen Minutes. The Paradox of Andy Warhol. Las Vegas NV. PaperBall, 2003.
Brands, W. H. Masters of Enterprise. The Celebrity as Entrepreneur. New York, NY. The Free Press, 1999.
Siegel, Marc. “Doing It For Andy.” Art Journal. Vol. 62, No. 1, (Spring, 2003). College Art Association.
Wolf, Reva. “Collaboration as Social Exchange: Screen Tests/A Diary by Gerrard Malanga and Andy Warhol” Art Journal. Vol. 52, No. 4, Interactions Between Artists and Writers. (Winter, 1993) College Art Association.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
the news
I am part of something: No Culture Icons
also
6 pit bulls in 7 minutes:
pit bulls are the new chihuahuas meaning,
menacing spikes on leather are the new bedazzled gems on sweatpants, and
facial tattoos are the new over-sized handbags.
also
6 pit bulls in 7 minutes:
pit bulls are the new chihuahuas meaning,
menacing spikes on leather are the new bedazzled gems on sweatpants, and
facial tattoos are the new over-sized handbags.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
current events (in images)
Waves of destruction in the South
The face of another
Bin Laden is in Heaven
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Somewhere to disappear, with alec soth.
your hambone's connected to your rhythm bone, now hear the word of the lord.
your hambone's connected to your rhythm bone, now hear the word of the lord.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
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