Prettybrilliant: hey what if

Art can kill you, if you aren’t a panda

Zhao Bandi (above) had it right… art can be dangerous business.

It all started when I had the idea of making my own bamboo fabric. Bamboo fabric is one of the most mysterious eco-fabrics recently invented as a magically eco-licious large-scale industrial product for sale to environmentally conscious yoga moms. The bamboo is grown in organic, super-productive groves in Southeast Asia, harvested… something happens… and then it’s this amazing fabric that saves the planet, wicks away your yoga-sweat, won’t trigger little Isadore or Cyrus’s wool/hemp allergy, and so on. Great stuff! I myself have some 80% bamboo viscose, 20% wool leggings that are THE BOMB and only rarely leave my body from November to March.

But, the fiber nerd wants to know, how it is made? Can I turn the stand of bamboo culms (great Scrabble word, btw) that is rapidly devouring my back yard into some crunchy hot-shorts? I’m sure it’s not even the right kind of bamboo, but if I could make it work I would have some rad shorts, and also probably a MacArthur Genius Grant. Plus, the northwest corner of the yard, to grow tomatoes in.

This is what my backyard looks like. Yes, that’s me.

According to the internet, there are two ways of processing bamboo into fabric. One method involves lots of caustic chemicals that are probably dumped into panda watering-holes. The other method is so slow and tedious and mechanical that the internet could hardly be bothered to tell you about it. There are some great poorly-translated descriptions like this one: “In automatic processing, a woody tools of a bamboo plant have been dejected as well as a healthy enzymes have been used to furnish a tear-jerking mass where fibers have been combed out as well as spun in to a yarn.”

What the internet (thanks, ehow!) was willing to say about the potentially domestic, mechanical method of processing bamboo is as follows:

1. Crush the bamboo between heavy rocks or between two plywood boards clamped together.

2. Put the crushed bamboo into a container and add water and natural enzymes. Allow this mixture to sit until the bamboo becomes soft and turns into a pulp-like substance. Drain the bamboo and let it dry.

3. Cut the bamboo fibers into smaller pieces and put them in a vat that’s pressurized and contains water and amine oxide, a mild, nontoxic solvent. Heat the mixture and allow it to stay in the container until the bamboo fibers dissolve.

…Then do some more magical things involving spinnerets and amine oxide, which looks like a chemical that actually won’t kill you on contact. What really caught my interest, however, were the first two steps. If you hadn’t figured this out already, the first two steps are usually my favorite part of any complicated process… and often as far as I get. But look! Grinding and subjecting bamboo to enzymes is what pandas do when they eat it! Wouldn’t it be funny if I could chew up a bunch of bamboo and then let the chewed pulp sit around until it broke down the fibers into usable mush? Isn’t this exactly how they make the Peruvian corn- or cassava-based beer, chicha?

Yes, yes it is. Wikipedia says; “Traditionally, the chicha is prepared from cassava root by women, using a very simple method. Pieces of washed, peeled root are thoroughly chewed in the mouth, and the resulting juice is spat into a bowl. The fibrous mass that remains in the mouth is used elsewhere.” WHERE? Damn you, ‘citation needed.’ I am so, so curious.
Anyhow, I started chewing on some of the bamboo just out of curiousity, but it doesn’t taste so great. It was fortunate that I looked it up, because it turns out this stuff is rather poisonous when raw. According to one of the more alarmist treatments of the subject (http://www.helium.com/items/1181289-edible-bamboo), “because they are high in cyanide eating raw Bamboo can cause severe intestinal pain, dysentery and even death. It is said during times of war they [the author means, ‘The Orientals’] used to feed unprepared Bamboo to their prisoners of war and then laughed at them as they writhed in pain and often died horrible deaths.” Wow, how cool/racist. Tomorrow I’ll try parboiling the stuff, but for now I should probably go to bed before I get any more good ideas.

Siamese teacups and other cutesy post-modern bric-a-brac

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of being paid a laughably high hourly wage to “gallery-sit” a number of works by the famous British artist Mona Hatoum, which were installed in a small room that was usually full of people. The most fun part of this job was trying to prevent people from stepping on one of her cast-silicone floor mats, which was, per her directions, installed on the floor with no ropes around it or any other indication that this was a very expensive piece of art and thereby, implicitly, not for walking on. The mat, shaped like some intestines or something, was also placed just under one of her other works, such that anyone who wanted to look at the piece on the wall was very, very likely to step on the piece on the floor. After a while, the volume of people coming through the gallery was such that the other art-sitter and I just gave up, and hoped that no one was wearing soccer cleats.

Another piece that I spent the weekend with, however, irked me in a different way. T42, a pair of fused porcelain teacups, made some kind of clever commentary about the ready-made and utility of objects and the Meret Oppenheim or Duchamp something something… but mostly it was a cutesy piece of crap that makes two people drink out of it at the same time, cheek-to-cheek like some kind of 1950s commercial.

Because if only one person drank out of it, they would get hot tea all over themselves! Get it? The curator who put together the show demonstrated this piece a couple of times by way of flirting with VIPs who came by the gallery. Not with real tea, or real mouth-touching, you understand, but with real commodity-based intimacy, or whatever.

Anyhow, I think it’s dumb. I am glad that a guy from the London Evening Standard was up-front enough to call it “an attractive work [that] fails to disturb any preconceptions whatsoever.” If you really find this kind of thing “disquieting,” your life is too damn quiet. I also have rarely seen an art piece which more screams, “collect me! I am an hott commodity! Put me on your shelf with your stuff and only those people who know will know, you know?” I find it rather irritating when grown-up artists with pretty okay bodies of work and international reputations decide they should crank out some crowd-pleasing bridge-collection stuff like this to get $$. And then it gets put in shows and I have to look at it and get angry, because I draw better ideas than this on napkins in bars when I am drunk, and then use the napkins to clean up my spilled beer because they are still not such great ideas.

If I had access to a porcelain farm, I would grow some three-way-conjoined teacups as a response to these teacups, and call them Menage-a-Trois. I think this name is apt because, whichever way you drink it, someone gets hot and wet. That’ll be 3 grand apiece, thanks.

Drown-A-Bride

I’ve always been intrigued by weddings and fake weddings as venues for staging bizarre dramas or choking social conventions… I recently had an appealing but worthless idea (more like a daydream, really) for a wedding ceremony in which a bride in a rice-paper dress and ice shoes jumped into a river, as a sort of music-video-glammy melodramatic marriage-to-the-sea baptism/suicide gesture. Let’s see where this get’s me…

Aha! A quite lovely rice-paper wedding dress by some kid from Hong Kong! Though I had envisioned more of a cowl-neck; I have such a violent loathing of strapless wedding gowns that even one-shouldered ones get on my nerves.

Weirdly, the only ice shoes I can find online pertain to Kinga Araya, a Polish/Canadian artist, who did a performance, “Cold Feet” in 2003 in which she danced on ice-shoes to Polish and American rock songs from 1980 to the present.

http://www.kingaaraya.com/lib_image.php?mode=fullsize&roll=Cold_Feet_(The_Dance)&photo=col6.jpg

Her website is kind of la-la-la-‘identity’ and la-la-la-‘exile,’ and her masochistic tendencies rather echo masochistic tendencies of other Eastern European performance lady and completely terrifying person Marina Abramovic:

This is a picture of Marina Abromovich whipping herself, after cutting a star into her stomach with a broken wine glass, but before lying on a giant ice cross for half an hour. See, Eastern European performance ladies love ice! It must be their chilly Soviet upbringings.

Anyhow, Kinga Araya is ok because it’s pretty sick that she defected by walking from Poland to Italy, and she is all about the feet as loci of social intuition and discomfort. I have always thought that feet are a particularly emotional and Dionysian part of the body; at the opposite extreme of the body from the brain and sometimes seemingly picking up on different signals altogether. For me, the bottoms of the feet in particular are tied to the unconscious experience of everyday life, the things we are constantly in contact with and deeply influenced by but rarely think about or acknowledge. Also, my feet are cold all the damn time and a remarkable number of my everyday habits were developed in response to this particular genetic defect of mine. Hm.

Anyways, Kinga’s alright. She also made some pretty awesome glass shoes (“Discipline”) which are so not Cinderella:

http://www.kingaaraya.com/lib_image.php?mode=fullsize&roll=Discipline&photo=dis1.jpg

I know, I know… all these things have an BDSM sort of quality to them, and in fact “cold feet” as a search term brought up some fairly predictable bondage porn. It’s a sad fact that porn is always two steps ahead of art. Frankly, I think that women artists who engage the feminist discourse about the body through their work (or hell, maybe just all artists) should have to take a class called “Your Work Looks Like Porn: How to Deal,” in which they are assigned a lot of varied pornography to watch and have to explain how their work is totally not just about getting their audience off or making themselves look hot. Or if it is, then what does that mean? Though of course, the danger of educating an artist is that they may become like me and write about art they would do if they didn’t think they had stupid ideas.

In any case, everybody loves a wet woman. Particularly if there is a lot of fabric involved.

Etc., etc. Notice how these are all in the ocean, or pools, or nice tranquil mountain ponds… nobody’s jumping in the Hudson, here. I guess there would be some risk of drowning with all that tulle on ya, or your boobs falling out of your damned ugly strapless dress.

***TANGENT: it’d be great to do this performance with two brides, one human and one robotic:

Robot Bride! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_zWna0OZcs

Anyhow, the real and robot brides would be cool, because the robot couldn’t feel the pain of the ice shoes, but it would be utterly destroyed by jumping into water, while the human bride would be cold but fine, although no longer identifiably a bride.

***END OF TANGENT

Apropos of all those brides in brooks, did you know that “trash the dress” is a genre or school of eXtreme wedding photography?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trash_the_dress

Haha, the world of weddings is a strange, strange place. Great article about it here on the website of the “wedding photojournalist association”:

http://www.wedpix.com/articles/trash-the-dress/ttd-trash-the-dress-photo-sessions.html

“It’s brides being themselves,” Matt says, “expressing how crazy or free or how removed they are from their parents’ photographs.” AHAHAHAHA

The New York Times weighs in:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/fashion/weddings/10trash.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22trash+the+dress%22&st=nyt

Also, that bitch is totally photoshopped. I mean, there’s just no way. Her head is weirdly glowing with rimefrost and twice the size of her body; something is fishy in the state of denmark you might say.

This last chilly, (fake), melancholic Ophelia-y photo is more or less the note I want to hit with my imagined project. There are wet women who are Anita Eckberg in La Dolce Vita:

and then there are wet women who are Ophelia:

Further proof, if any was needed, that Alexandre Cabanel should have been drowned at birth. Why is Ophelia always hot even when drowning? Everyone really does love a wet woman, even one who is insane and dead. I guess the whole Ophelia thing is very bridal, what with the flowers and the virginity and whatnot; I should reread that thing (I mean Hamlet, not Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Whiny Crazy Girls or Whatever).

Shoutout here to a gal who went to my school. Lila-roo Duncome-Lieber’s art (while not always ‘my thing’) is quite beautiful sometimes and has a lot of qualities that I was impressed by and admire.

http://lila-roo.blogspot.com/

She did a number of swimming-with-brightly-colored-trailing-plastic performances that were really very striking.

http://vimeo.com/1104550

There’s also a picture of her in a paper wedding veil before she lights it on fire… we seem to be thinking along the same lines in terms of destroying brides.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_S5jzD3RkQlI/SnZ2KDNdXUI/AAAAAAAAALY/icKXJnWjX8k/s1600-h/lilaveil2.jpg

Also her wedding performance with Norah Hoover was pretty great:

http://norahhoover.blogspot.com/2009/05/wedding.html

So yeah, brides are terrible and I kind of want to destroy them. What a dreadful phenomenon, normal women being channeled into a gruesome, financially ruinous, aesthestically disastrous universal archetype, THE BRIDE. Even Duchamp wanted her to be stripped bare by her bachelors, even.

So much preparation for a brief moment that (while a great excuse for a party) basically represents the destruction of the individual and their merging into the formless, goopy mass of society. The traditional form of the Comedy is that it ends with a marriage, the implication being that whatever happens to the characters afterwards is probably completely predictable and not worth reading about; the bride represents this phenomenon. I personally think marriage is nice and useful and a handy arrangement, but somehow brides are just awful and frightening (“fear of brides” has no google result). It’s sort of like clowns; you know they’re a normal person under all that make-up and stuff, but why do they look like that and why are they acting that way? They’ve temporarily adopted this creepy role that’s incomprehensible and dehumanizing.

Aah! Run away! Melt it! Drown it! Wash it off!

Afterthought: in addition to uncomfortable, slippery, heavy ice shoes, she should have a bouquet of ice flowers! They can drip all over her arms and make the front of her dress sticky and melted. Oh, that would be fun.