Omniphilia

Let's start off easy.

The first image seems the most banal. But we'll get back to it.
The second is clearly far from innocent. Or rather, it is its absolute innocence that brings the tension.
Just one more innocent painting to keep you off-guard...

And here we go:Most of Melissa Steckbauer's spicier pictures are somewhere along the lines of the above. They are people in erotic/sexual situations with animals, realistic or mythical ones. Now, how in the world can she include the first painting you see here (the bear-girl) in the same series, Animalia, as the ones you've just seen?
That is precisely what gives the series such power. They demistify us by including us in the myth. This human animal becomes a being of flesh. Of flesh and myth. This teddy bear is the same girl that's having sex with the dog, moving away from the otherness as it penetrates her. Better: she and the beast are one flesh. They are no different, as if in peace with their unbearable similarity. Look at the man with the bear. What is this? A killing? Could it possibly be a hug? No, it is a hug, be it intended or not. It is flesh, it is warm and cuddly. And foreign. Although harmonious - Steckenbauer insists that for her the crucial issue in terms of eroticism is ethics, which she seems to oppose to a set of taboos. But is there really no taboo? No hidden, dangerous zone? To the contrary, the further she goes, the more mysterious and ambivalent the universe. What is this animal, and how does one distinguish it from oneself?




In the interview at the end of this post, Steckbauer talks about her appreciation for "meat in the painting". And for softness and gentleness. And one of my favorite works of hers combines these two. It is somewhat different from the others, reminding me of Man Ray, maybe. What can we do, it says, what can we do if this is the touch of flesh, the touch that seems to go through my body, to immobilize us as it multiplies the members and gets us way out into oblivion, a communication made ambiguous, an identity lost, or repainted, or foresaken, for the sake of what, of what, oh don't ask me, enjoy.






PS: I dedicate this post to the memory of my aunt, whom I first had the chance to speak to when I was 17. We spoke on the phone (she lived in another country). Her very first words to me were: "Hello young man! How are you? How is your sex life?"

(via)

Munching Sweets

From the Towers

by Heather McHugh

Insanity is not a want of reason.
It is reason's overgrowth, a calculating kudzu.

Explaining why, in two-ton manifesti, thinkers sally forth
with testaments and pipe bombs. Heaven help us:

spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine down or
shower forth, but (for the earthling's sake) ignore
all prayers followed by against, or for. Teach us to bear

life's senselessness, our insignificance, and more;
let's call that sanity. The terrifying prospect isn't some
escapist with a novel, fond of comfort, munching sweets—

it is the busy hermeneut, so serious he's sour, intent on making
meaning of us all, and bursting from the towers to the streets.

Paintings by Hegyusz.

The Disappeared

Up to 30000 people disappeared during the period of dictatorship in Argentina, lasting from 1976 to 1983. The desaparecidos, as they are commonly called (the dictator General Videla infamously said they were "neither alive or dead, but disappeared"), are still a very hot topic in Argentina. Following the political changes, the new democratic government introduced what they called the Ley de Punto Final, which impeded any attempts of legally pursuing the lower-level executioners of the Dirty War - thus, granting them impunity. The law of the Punto Final was voided by the Supreme Court of Argentina in 2005.
The majority of the desaparecidos still remain missing.
What made me enquire into all this was a photographic project called Ausencias ("Absences", 2007) by Gustavo Germano.
Yes, the people who disappear from the photos are cases of the desaparecidos.

1975

Omar Darío Amestoy

Mario Alfredo Amestoy

2006

.

Mario Alfredo Amestoy

---

1970
Maria Irma Ferreira

Maria Susana Ferreira

2006
.

Maria Susana Ferreira

---

1973

Andrés Servín

Raúl María Caire

Luisa Inés Rodríguez

1973

Andrés Servín

.

Luisa Inés Rodríguez

An interview with the artist (in Spanish) can be found at the Argentinian Museum of Memory.

The Song Is You

It might seem innocent.

Yes, this is innocence. It is the purity of what happens when the postmodernisms and the camps and the sooavantgardes have made their statements and played their anti-tunes, and yet, we are still there, trying to listen in to that something special.

Call us romantic. Call us Those Who Couldn't Stand The Progress And Stepped Back.Retrograded, taking the easy way out, exploring the (music's, world's, history's) feedback.

Yet feedback is not the sound that comes back to its source. It is not the echo. It is the echo used as an input.
Thus, what you call feedback is the mere beginning, the source material of the process of creation. As the world comes back crumbling to the imperfection of our ever-childish senses, our feeble gestures, breaking through our inherited self-irony, make things possible. Better, they give us back the light.


Too light? Too naive?
Would you prefer this?


The Gospel was right: The meek shall inherit the Earth. Actually, they've inherited it already. Along with the self-irony, they took what was most precious, and what many deemed lost - the damn aura. Yes, the damn aura still shining and glowing through all the mechanical reproductions. We still want their bloody flesh, we still want to know this is where it's at, right here, between the stage and you, between the song and you.

x x x
All this crossed my mind when watching the brilliant The Song Is You festival at Powiększenie in Warsaw recently.
The song that stayed with me the most was simple.
Here it is:

Do you get it? Beyond the gorgeous lyrics, can you feel how it was, listening to it in the club basement, with the grand piano behind Momus, the lights, the weekend dying away? Or can you imagine it? How different is the song you hear from mine?
More on the festival here. Don't miss tonight (12.03), the last part of the festival, with Kyst and AU.

Kyst

Past Present

Take a look at the pictures by Roger Cremers. The series, which won an award at the 2009 World Press Photo, is called Preserving Memory: Visitors at the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, 30 April-4 May.



No, I will not be writing about how the ever-present cameras turn us into monsters. Or about consumerism versus culture.
What interests me here, to start with, is how we position ourselves in relation to the past.
What is given to us is not merely a luggage - a heritage that is like an object. It is an ever-eroding landscape. And each person has her own map she may or may not use to rebuild it, or rather, to build herself into it.
Watch these bodies. These figures. Watch how they open a dialogue they are not aware of. Watch how they become, that's it, a sign.
Maybe the most dramatic is the last one, the young man lying on the ground, his hands close to his face. Forget his camera. Now, what do you see?
Or maybe the most dramatic is the first, black figure, that is watching birds through binoculars, or a plane, or he could almost be shouting a friendly greeting to someone standing on the roof... were it not the seemingly anonymous bricks behind him. Were it not our maps. And now, with your map, what do you see? Who is hitting him? Shooting?
Or rather, what is he, what are they protecting themselves against?

What makes a sign a sign?
When does it signify, lead to the signified? How does the arrow gain its shape? How is it born?
How much of these vectors is rooted in us so deeply, we spell it out with every word, unknowingly?

Take this much less spectacular project by William Boling, called Never Gone. Boling took photographs of the places in Atlanta where the Battle of Atlanta occurred in July 1864.





So what makes a sign a sign?
When does it signify, lead to the signified? How does the arrow gain its shape? How is it born?
How much of these vectors is rooted in us so deeply, we spell it out with every word, unknowingly?

How To Win An Art Contest In One Easy Step

Make one.
Tom Polo created the 2009 B.E.S.T. Contemporary Art Prize for Painting contest. The criteria were typical of the art contests we know. Except for one small point, which stated:
eligible entrants are artists born on the 1st February, 1985 and named as 'Tommaso Polo' on their birth certificates.
The exhibition of the finalists (guess who?) is taking place at the MOP gallery in Sydney.
The winning work, by - you guessed it - Tom Polo, is called Continuous One Liners (Young People Today).Possibly many of my dear readers are thinking, we've had similar ideas, but they were too childish to execute. Maybe the most seductive part of tricksters is that by putting to life the silliness we only imagine (or think we imagined), they at once make it more serious and much more ridiculous.
You can find an interview with the artist at The Art Life.
Why B.E.S.T.? Because Everybody Still Tries.

Anonymous. 3 works by Armin Rohr

I can't get these pictures out of my head.
Especially the last one is mesmerizing. Is it peaceful? Mysterious? Haunting? Creepy? Brutal?
The mass in the first two paintings that makes up a threatening, or at least disquieting block, is here replaced by three distinct figures. The space is neither claustrophobic, as in the first one, nor agoraphobic, as could be claimed about the second (notice the ceiling moving up above the horizontal line that "closes" the picture). In the third picture, the space is abstract. It is the water we often feel is the closest to the sky. So what's the matter? Maybe it's the skyish space combined with the strokes, the juicy, dripping pinks that get feverish in the center? Maybe it's the unfaceness of these faces? The ghost should be ephemeral, translucid. Yet here, the ghosts are opaque. They are thick with body. And moving in.

All works are by Armin Rohr, found on his blog.

If You Want To Cry

...cry to this.

My Mother, My Son by Mary Frey

And another one, less obvious, but no less gorgeous - Bathroom Landscape:

Every once in a while the question comes back lurking: are there things that are not to be shown? Or rather: not to be worked at? Do you imagine this - a woman standing in the room with a camera, waiting for the right moment so she can take a picture of her son carrying her mother? Hold her up just a bit honey... Just a little more...
And yet, this is one of the most touching pictures I have seen in quite a while.

(via)

Zoonoia

From the crazy guys at Koerner Union comes the most original dog portrait of 2008:

...and the most unappealing digital album of 2007 - Ready Made. Which is also an accomplishment of sorts.