March 2012
1 post
February 2012
1 post
May 2011
1 post
July 2010
1 post
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,...
May 2010
1 post
Siamese teacups and other cutesy post-modern...
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...
November 2009
1 post
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...
August 2009
1 post
Fur, latex, space-time continuum
I had intended to write about a very ambitious and quite strange installation I failed to complete for an art class my senior year, but first I must draw your attention to an amazing thing I found on the internet while trying to research the topic:
http://www.tsbvi.edu/Education/vmi/tactile_symbols.htm
This is the section of the website for the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired...
June 2009
1 post
I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000
I was going to apply for a job today (or possibly a grant, though there don’t seem to be many ‘wanted: unschooled dilettante to make weird shit’ grants out there), but then I got distracted by thinking about an idea for a performance art piece I had a while ago, based on the misquote attributed to supermodel Linda Evangelista, “I don’t get out of bed for less than...
April 2009
1 post
The Snow Cam
Inspired by the Wallace Stevens poem of high-school English class fame (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-snowman.html)
and by the simple yet ingenious program (a camera watching the snow!) that aired on Somerville Cable Access Television every time it snowed in my town when I was growing up, which always looked more or less like this:
***WTF/OMG tangent***
...
March 2009
2 posts
Deborah Butterfield vs. Pokey the Horse
Deborah Butterfield makes incredibly boring statues of horses.
Thay are all the same, bleakly commercial and 70’s-office-park looking, and every major sculpture collection in the US has one.
I can’t believe she passes for a major woman artist in the 21st century. I particularly hate the ones at the Portland Airport:
Why can’t we have a horse sculpture like the one at the...
Nabokov's Nightlight
The idea started out as a potential variant of Throwies, that beloved low-tech hi-lumens Graffiti Research Lab invention: http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=6#video
A Throwie is assembled from a magnet, an LED, a watch battery and some duct tape. The results stick harmlessly to metal and glow. You can use them to be a stupid hippie and get arrested in China like this guy:
I have been...
February 2009
1 post
This summer: a nest in the tree in my front yard
Watching Barbarella for the umpteenth time last night made me realize I need a nest (a ‘love nest,’ if you will.
Here’s the scene in question:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3-E3xuQtqI
This is sort of a theme in my projects; I have attempted a number of structures that were essentially intended as architectural realizations of (or locations for) sexual fantasy. I think a...
January 2009
1 post
