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On Monday, December 19th, we partnered with Lenovo computers to build out the ultimate art-themed smackdown. Hosted at Villain in Williamsburg, guests stepped into a fully imagined warehouse art party. That night it was all about participation. We created a series of art activities to get guests making art and meeting each other. Guests captured the revelry of the night in Ventikoland’s projection photo booth. After some savory Espolón cocktails and tacos the art battle was ready to begin. 2 amazing artists competed head-to-head in a series of timed challenges and a head-to-head battle of creative awesomeness. Interludes were provided by a pop & lock round girl, battling breakdancers, and a duo of beatboxers.
Event Design by Adam Aleksander Presents
Photography by Lukas Maverick Greyson
Hunter S. Thompson has been reduced to a costume by people who mistake velocity for direction. Aviator glasses, cigarette holder, whiskey, a convertible somewhere in the desert. It is one of the more successful acts of cultural taxidermy: preserve the hide, discard the animal.
The real Thompson was not addicted to chaos. He was addicted to clarity, and clarity often required driving straight into the machinery while everyone else was content admiring the paint. His journalism was not an escape from reality but a refusal to let reality disguise itself as objectivity. Objectivity, after all, is a lucrative product. Institutions sell it the way luxury brands sell exclusivity: expensive, polished, and available to anyone with enough money. Thompson understood that every newspaper, every campaign, every corporation carried an aesthetic before it carried a fact. He simply refused to pretend otherwise. That refusal has become strangely unfashionable.
We live in an age where outrage is manufactured with industrial precision and rebellion arrives pre-packaged, sponsored, and optimized for engagement. Even dissent has become a subscription service. Thompson would have recognized the machinery immediately, though he would probably have laughed at how cheaply it now operates. The art world offers a similar spectacle. Every decade announces its latest revolution, carefully escorted into climate-controlled galleries by investors and publicists. A banana becomes an asset. An empty gesture becomes a manifesto. Language inflates until criticism itself resembles advertising. The market no longer waits to absorb rebellion; it commissions it in advance. Thompson distrusted that kind of choreography. Not because he rejected experimentation, but because he despised fraud dressed as courage. Style without consequence bored him. Provocation without risk was merely interior decoration.
His greatest subject was never drugs, politics, or excess. It was power's astonishing ability to convince intelligent people that absurdity is normal. Elections, wars, television, celebrity, finance—they all depended upon the same invisible agreement: if enough respectable voices repeat a fiction, eventually it acquires the posture of truth. His answer was neither neutrality nor ideology. It was immersion. Enter the carnival, describe every grotesque detail, and trust the reader to notice that the clowns are writing legislation.
Today his image circulates more efficiently than his ideas. He has become an icon for people who enjoy the romance of disorder but have little appetite for confronting institutions that manufacture it. That is the final irony. The man who spent his life exposing the counterfeit has himself become a collectible.
The cigarette holder survives. The sunglasses survive. The caricature survives. The dangerous questions remain largely untouched.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Another detail from the artist's studio. Steina is the artist I will be featuring in this year's issue of the H2O Guide.
a range of
shades from
pure black to
pure white
with no color
the hardest one to achieve
I remember being an art student at the University of Barcelona, spending those long hours in color theory class surrounded by swatches, pigments, brushes, and the particular kind of confusion that only art school can produce.
The assignment sounded simple enough: I had to deliver all the Pantones I had made myself in class and at home. Every color had to be mixed by hand, patiently and precisely, as if I were trying to convince the universe that I knew what color really was.
And then there was gray.
Now, gray has always had a bit of a reputation. People say it isn't really a color. It's what happens when color gives up. It's the sky before rain, the concrete under your feet, the space between black and white. A kind of diplomatic agreement between two opposites.
But let me tell you something: gray was the hardest color I ever had to de-code.
I could make the reds. I could make blues. I could make yellows that looked like they had been sitting in the Barcelona sun all afternoon. I could make greens that reminded me of the trees around the university. But gray? Gray wouldn't cooperate.
A little too much black and I had a dark gray. A little too much white and suddenly it was too bright. Add more black and I had something gloomy enough to ruin the whole afternoon. Add white and I had nothing but a pale ghost of the color I thought I had made.
I began to understand that gray wasn't the absence of color at all.
Gray was black and white arguing with each other.
And there I was, an art student, standing over my little collection of hand-mixed Pantones, trying to make something that everybody insisted wasn't really there.
Funny thing about art school: sometimes the hardest things to understand are the things everybody tells you are simple.
So I kept mixing.
I kept adding a little of this and a little of that, looking at the paint under the classroom lights, holding it up, putting it down, starting again.
And when I finally got the gray I wanted, it didn't look like much.
That was the trouble.
It just looked like gray.
But I knew what it had taken to get there.
Our teacher was very strict. The kind of teacher who didn't hand out compliments just because you had shown up and mixed your paints without spilling them. But somewhere along the way, she told me that I had a great eye for understanding color.
I remember that.
Because when a strict teacher tells you something like that, you don't forget it.
In the end, I got the highest degree in the class. And the Pantones I had mixed, all those little pieces of color I had struggled with and argued with and stared at for hours, were exhibited at the university.
There they were.
My colors, lined up and hanging there for people to look at.
And perhaps nobody looking at them could know how much time went into each one. They couldn't see the indecision, the corrections, the colors that were almost right but not quite. They couldn't see me standing in that classroom wondering why one gray looked dead and another looked alive.
They just saw the finished colors.
Especially the gray.
And maybe that's the funny thing about art. The hardest work can sometimes become the quietest thing on the wall.
You can spend an afternoon trying to make gray and, when you finally succeed, somebody walks past and says, “Well, that's gray.”
And they're right.
But you know better.
You know that inside that gray are all the colors you had to understand before you could make it.
And maybe that was what my teacher saw when she said I had a good eye.
Not that I could make colors.
But that I could see them.
And sometimes, I think, that's the whole job.
And maybe that's the thing about color, and maybe that's the thing about being an art student too: sometimes nobody else can see the work that went into something.
Sometimes they just see gray.
But you know every color that is hiding inside it.
Giorgos Christides the 36 year old Greek Freelance journalist and Economics editor discusses his experiences in his austerity ridden homeland for a BBC magazine article titled “Greece brain drain 'wrecking my social life'” Christides states “As the queues of jobless Greeks grow, more and more young people are moving abroad. …The trend is not limited to 30 and 40-something professionals, but is spreading to younger age groups as well. According to the latest national polls, more than seven out of 10 young Greeks aged 18 to 24 believe that emigration is the ideal - indeed the only - way out from the crisis. Two out of 10 have already applied for jobs and university places abroad. …[Greece] considered an economic wasteland for ambitious young students and graduates, who are now suffering from unemployment rates in excess of 50%. Workers' and students' mobility has been, of course, one of the landmarks and major achievements of European integration. But it is now evolving into a medium-term death sentence for the ageing Greek society and economy. …In an era characterised by intensified global competition for talented, innovative and highly-skilled workers, the brain drain afflicting Greece means the country is losing its best hope of revival. Viewing your country as a dead-end and a prison is therefore a more daunting and condemning prospect than defaulting or exiting the euro." Inspired by BBC ow.ly/c4X0R image source linkedin ow.ly/c4WZ6
In February 2006 Craig Tracy opened the PaintedAlive Gallery in his home city, New Orleans, La, USA. PaintedAlive is the first gallery in the world dedicated exclusively to fine art Bodypainted images. But where did his passion for using the human body as a canvas start?
READ ON...
Not a single day has gone by in my life when I haven't thought about death.
Milagro is a mask alive,
her name ends with an o but she is totally an XX.
She has brothers and sisters, she is the youngest.
Milagro smells spring and reborn.
You'll feel her odor someday, she promise to take a visit.
Click me, come closer!
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Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon the Spanish Sociologist editor of the OII-edited journal Policy and Internet. Gonzalez-Bailon specializes in how online networks influence exposure to ideas and political debates, and how the internet technologies shape the flow of information. Gonzalez-Bailon published an article on Aljazeera stating, “Under the slogan "Real Democracy Now", the protests [Spain May 2011] mobilised tens of thousands of people of all ages and affiliations, demanding better forms of political representation. Many protesters proclaimed in their placards that the Spanish Revolution was coming, a prophecy soon turned into a trending hashtag in Twitter and reverberating fast across the galleries of social media. …In the rare context of mass mobilisations, online networks behave exceptionally well: they are fast and efficient in transmitting information and spreading awareness. But they cannot do much to help a mass movement articulate their aims: they give expression to a cacophony of voices but when the lights of the protest go out, all these opinions fall like confetti after a party. …Can social media transform bursts of political activism into stable forms of participation? …Otherwise, their revolutionary message will be written on wet sand.”
Well now, settle back in, because today we celebrate a mixed up story. Jean Genet. He didn’t just come out of nowhere, he came out of orphanages, reform schools, prison yards, and borrowed rooms where the wallpaper knew more secrets than the neighbors ever would. France tried to erase him early on, but Genet took that erasure and turned it into ink. He wrote like a man carving his name into a cell wall, slow and deliberate, knowing the guards would read it later. He had a way of crowning the uncrowned. Thieves, traitors, hustlers, sailors leaning on the rail at dawn, Genet looked at them and saw ceremony. Not the kind with flags and brass bands, but the kind that happens when two people recognize each other in the dark. His novels and plays don’t clean anyone up. They make dirt sacred, make shame glow. That’s why they still feel dangerous. Genet didn’t want justice; he wanted intensity. He wanted to go all the way to the edge and lean out just far enough to describe the view.
Somewhere along the road, Genet crossed paths with Alberto Giacometti, another man obsessed with the human figure, but for different reasons. Genet wrote The Studio of Alberto Giacometti like it was a love letter slipped under a locked door. He didn’t talk about sculpture the way art critics do, measuring angles and influences. He talked about Giacometti the way you talk about a man you’ve watched wrestle with ghosts. Those long, thin figures, Genet saw them as survivors, scraped down to their essence, like prisoners who’ve lost everything except the fact that they’re still standing. In Giacometti’s studio, Genet found a mirror of his own work. Both men were stripping life to the bone, refusing decoration, refusing lies. Genet said Giacometti wasn’t trying to make people beautiful he was trying to make them real. A body reduced until it could no longer pretend. That’s Genet all over. Whether he’s writing about a murderer, a lover, or a statue frozen in dust and light, he’s asking the same question: what’s left when you take everything else away?
So when you read Genet, or stand in front of a Giacometti figure, don’t expect comfort. Expect recognition. Expect that quiet moment when you realize the distance between saint and criminal, flesh and spirit, art and life, it’s thinner than you were told.
Now, we can’t pass through this tell without mentioning the poems, the ones that made polite society reach for the volume knob and twist it hard to the right.
Genet’s poems are soaked in sex the way a back alley is soaked in rain and cigarette smoke. Sex for him wasn’t decoration, and it sure wasn’t romance-card stuff. It was power, danger, worship, humiliation, glory, all tangled together like bodies in the dark where you can’t quite tell whose hand is whose. These poems don’t flirt. They stare you down. They say: this is what desire looks like when it refuses to behave. A lot of poets use sex as metaphor. Genet used metaphor as sex. Every touch, every look, every act becomes a ritual, almost religious. And that’s the real scandal, not the flesh, but the holiness. He wrote erotic poems the way medieval monks wrote about God, except Genet’s God wore boots, smelled of sweat, and might rob you blind before morning. In his lines, lust isn’t the opposite of purity; it is purity, stripped of excuses. You’ve got to remember the time he was writing in, too. To write openly as a gay man, to center desire that society had already labeled criminal, was itself an act of rebellion. Genet didn’t argue for acceptance. He didn’t ask for tolerance. He doubled down. He made outlaw desire ceremonial, almost royal. In these poems, the body becomes a flag raised in enemy territory.
There’s also tenderness there, even when it’s buried under provocation. A kind of aching devotion. Genet knew that sex exposes people faster than confession ever could. In those moments, masks fall off, hierarchies wobble, and the truth slips out. That’s what he was after, not shock for shock’s sake, but revelation. The moment when desire tells you who you really are, and maybe who you can’t escape being. So if those poems make you uncomfortable, that’s part of the program. Genet believed discomfort was honest. He’d probably say if you’re blushing, you’re paying attention.
—
Le Condamné à Mort
SUR MON COU sans armure et sans haine, mon cou
Que ma main plus légère et grave qu'une veuve
Effleure sous mon col, sans que ton cour s'émeuve, Laisse tes dents poser leur sourire de loup
O viens mon beau soleil, ô viens ma nuit d'Espagne, Arrive dans mes yeux qui seront morts demain.
Arrive, ouvre ma porte, apporte-moi ta main,
Mène-moi loin d'ici battre notre campagne.
Le ciel peut s'éveiller, les étoiles fleurir,
Ni les fleurs soupirer, et de prés l'herbe noire
Accueillir la rosée où le matin va boire,
Le clocher peut sonner : moi seul je vais mourir.
O viens mon ciel de rose, ô ma corbeille blonde!
Visite dans sa nuit ton condamné à mort.
Arrache-toi la chair, tue, escalade, mords,
Mais viens! Pose ta joue contre ma tête ronde.
Nous n'avions pas fini de nous parler d'amour.
Nous n'avions pas fini de fumer nos gitanes.
On peut se demander pourquoi les Cours condamnent
Un assassin si beau qu'il fair pâlir le jour.
Amour viens sur ma bouche! Amour ouvre tes portes!
Traverse les couloirs, descends, marche léger,
Vole dans l'escalier plus souple qu'un berger,
Plus soutenu par l'air qu'un vol de feuilles mortes.
O traverse les murs; s'il le faut marche au bord
Des toits, des océans; couvre-toi de lumière,
Use de la menace, use de la prière,
Mais viens, ô ma frégate, une heure avant ma mort.
//Jean Genet, 1942
—
LET YOUR TEETH sink their wolfish grin
Into my tender and defenseless neck whose back
My hand lighter and more solemn than a widow
Strokes under my collar without your heart being moved.
O come my handsome sun,
O come my Spanish night,
Come into my eyes that will be dead tomorrow.
Come, open my door, give me your hand,
Lead me far from here to wander our countryside.
Let the sky awaken, the stars blossom,
Let the flowers sigh, the bells sound,
And the black grass greet the dew that morning will drink
In the fields: as for me I'm going to die.
O come my rosy sky,
O come my blond basket!
Come visit in his night your man sentenced to death.
Rip your flesh, kill, climb, bite,
But come! Come put your cheek against my round head.
We hadn't finished speaking of love
We hadn't even finished smoking our cigarettes.
It's a wonder how the courts could sentence
A murderer so fair that he makes day grow pale.
Love, come to my mouth! Love, open your door!
Walk through the halls, come down, walk softly,
Fly down the stairs, more agile than a shepherd,
Sustained in the air better than a flight of dead leaves.
O go through the walls; if need be, walk along the edge
Of the roofs, of oceans; cover yourself with light,
Use threats, use prayer,
But come, O my frigate, one hour before my death.
//Jean Genet, 1942
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
This 2012 artwork is by Mexican visual artist Carlos Amorales and is called "We will see how everything reverberates". It was photographed during an exhibition at the Turner Contemporary gallery, Margate, England (March until September 2015).
Ann investigates visual memory and the traces of human activity embodied within objects. In creating this installation she has deconstructed the elements that dominated her previous wall paintings and re-imagined them in contrasting sculptural forms that have a solid, physical presence free of constraint. The whole is presented as a puzzle challenging our visual perception.
mail@amsutton-visualartist.com
D843_011
08/04/2017 : Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, Château La Coste : exposition Mountains and Seas (Ai Weiwei)
All Fingers Must Point Down
Today we celebrate a man who played the trumpet like it was murmuring secrets it wasn’t sure it should tell. That’s the beautiful Chet Baker.
Chet Baker came out of the West Coast, but his sound didn’t belong to any coast. It drifted. Like cigarette smoke in a cheap motel room, or a love letter folded one too many times. He had a horn that didn’t shout or testify, it confessed. Real quiet-like. You leaned in, and by the time you realized what was happening, the song had already moved into your bones. They said he looked like a movie star, and maybe that was part of the trouble. Folks hear that trumpet and think it’s all moonlight and convertibles, but underneath there’s a lot of gravel road. Baker sang the way some people talk when they’re alone. No armor. No tricks. Just a voice hanging there, asking if anyone’s listening. His sweet soft sugar-cotton candy voice takes you back and forth from the moon in an endless loop. Have you ever listened to his Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow version of “A Taste of Honey”? if thats not a cosmic orgasm I don’t know what is.
In jazz, everybody’s running races -faster, higher, louder. Baker? He walked. Sometimes he barely got there at all, but the space between the notes told you more than the notes ever could. Miles Davis knew that. Lester Young knew that. When you play less, you say more. That’s an old law, older than electricity. Baker’s life went every which way, like a radio signal fading in and out as you cross state lines. Fame came early, wisdom came late, and peace came when it felt like it. That trumpet carried the weight of it all. Every cracked note, every soft landing, every fall you don’t see coming until you’re already on the ground.
You see, Chet Baker had struggles the way some people have shadows, they followed him everywhere, even at noon. He wrestled with addiction for most of his life, and it wasn’t the romantic kind people like to dress up after the fact. It took things from him. Time. Trust. Chances. Even his ability to play the horn the way he once had. There were arrests, long disappearances, years where the music barely survived the man. He’d fall off the map, then show up again somewhere in Europe, battered but still blowing, still singing like the truth hadn’t let him go. And that voice by the later years, it wasn’t smooth anymore. It was weathered. Worn down. But sometimes wear tells you more than polish ever could. When Baker sang then, it sounded like someone who knew exactly what things cost. As for the end there’s a lot of noise around it, and not all of it’s honest.
Chet Baker died in 1988 in Amsterdam after falling from a hotel window. The official ruling was accidental. People have argued about it ever since, because people like their stories tied up neat, with a bow and a moral. But life doesn’t usually work that way, and neither did Baker.
So when you hear Chet Baker play, don’t listen for perfection. Listen for truth. Listen for the sound of a man standing in the doorway, half in the light, half in the dark, blowing a melody that knows it won’t last forever but plays it anyway.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Ann investigates visual memory and the traces of human activity embodied within objects. In creating this installation she has deconstructed the elements that dominated her previous wall paintings and re-imagined them in contrasting sculptural forms that have a solid, physical presence free of constraint. The whole is presented as a puzzle challenging our visual perception.
mail@amsutton-visualartist.com
Los Angeles Installation Artist, Jane Castillo, shares some of her time with Atelier Visit. Her interview was filmed in her home Studio in February 2010.
David Shrigley the 43 year old UK visual artist has provided an interview to MetroUK about his injection of humour into his work. Shrigley works with various media and is renowned for his humourous cartoons released as postcards and in softcover books. Shrigley’s work is said to have two major characteristics, an odd viewpoint and a limited technique. His use of free hand lines are crude and incorporated with the use of ruler, and the annotations to his drawings are frequently crossed out and suggestive of poor execution. In the interview Shrigley states “My work is really quite bleak a lot of the time and quite nasty as well, so maybe adding comedy into the mix makes it slightly less so… I’m not really interested in making people laugh that much; I just want to engage people and tell them something different.” Shrigley has produced a number of drawings published by the New Statesman. “I did it as an exercise to be a political cartoonist… I’m not really equipped to do that, in the sense that I can’t draw – I’m not an illustrator. I can’t draw caricatures of anybody…”
Meri Amber viewed and reviewed the "Bending the Truth" exhibition held at Verge Gallery by students from the Sydney College of the Arts. www.meriamber.com/blog/2013/03/bending-the-truth-at-verge...
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For the record, this is the intended orientation of this painting. Sometimes I'm not sure until I've lived with a piece for a while.
Visual artist Cande Aguilar in his studio. Oct. 8, 2013
© Imanol Miranda. Do not use without permission.
VA, 1980 (selenium toned gelatin-silver print)
george-elsasser.blogspot.com/2010/01/intersections-20-yea...