Festivals like the Noise Pop Culture Fest are ineffective for becoming a better artist. The time with each presenter is too short, the instruction too thrown together. It is a great place to find inspiration, however.
Take Jason Jaworski. He’s not the first poet I’ve seen typing snippets of poetry on old typewriters and giving them away to the sources of their inspiration. But surely he has the most compelling delivery. While other street poets set themselves apart with dapper hats and gloves, Jason wears a prom dress and a wrap of silver crinkly fabric. His head is crowned with an unknown substance and a wreath of false (chicken?) feet. Moreover he sits not in a desk or a chair, but barefoot and cross-legged in a tiny house filled with countless baubles and trinkets and swathes of fabric. The traveling improvisational poet is a rare creature but Jason Jaworski sets himself apart from the rest of the herd.
In truth, I wish there were herds of these poets, legions armed with typewriters and cases full of correctional fluid. I wish there were one on every street corner in every city, waiting with fingers poised on the keys, looking into the eyes of those in line, waiting for a simple unedited poem. These poetry buskers provide an important service. Poetry is the twin sister to music, first formed among cavemen beating their drums around breezy campfires as people huddled together, searching for warmth and meaning. Now it is thought to be a dusty relic, a secret language only understood by MFAs and and smirking grammar dominatrices.
Whereas poetry is thought to be abstract, poetry buskers use the person standing in front of them to create their art.
Whereas poetry is thought to be disconnected from its audience, poetry buskers create a one-on-one relationship.
Whereas poetry is thought to be collections of overly dwelled upon minutia, these intrepid fellows will type out a poem in under two minutes.
Whereas poetry has certainly become narcisstic and static, these poets create hundreds of poems and give them away.
francine van hove
You had me at “tweed noir.”
The Thomas Beale Cipher, by Andrew S Allen
I love the look of this animated short (John Pavlus called it “tweed noir”), which was created with a combination of real textures and rotoscoping. I interviewed Andrew about the making of the short, and I like his point on working with designers rather than animators:
If you put talented people in new situations, they’ll often surprise you. They don’t know the rules, so they wind up breaking most of them and interesting things come out of it. I worked with a talented crew of designers to animate the film who knew nothing about animation, but they brought a unique perspective around the framing of shots and a level of detail and richness in the scenes that I never would have gotten to on my own. When you’re trying to tell a big story in a small space, a certain visual clarity is needed — that’s something you see often in advertising design — we’re just taking it to the film world.
Read more at The Atlantic
I would call this: Balance or Life.
Always tightrope walking with a horrible fear of falling.
This is what my apartment will look like in ten years if the trajectory of my book collection continues.
No more books by Yoko Minemura
The typical U.S. historical marker raises more questions than it answers, and many of the signs are rife with errors and bias. Artist Norm Magnusson’s I-75 Project uses the form for a different sort of provocation.
The blog Thick Culture quotes Magnusson on the signs’ sly, Zinn-meets-Banksy appeal:
‘Are they real?’ is a question viewers frequently ask, meaning ‘Are they state-sponsored?’ I love this confusion and hope to slip in a message while people are mulling it over. These markers are just the kind of public art I really enjoy: gently assertive and nonconfrontational, firmly thought-provoking and pretty to look at and just a little bit subversive.
I don’t know about all that, but I know I like girls on bikes standing in front of murals.
GIRLS ON BIKES
An ongoing public installation project.
Working with volunteer models, bikes (INSA’s current preferred icon of commodified culture), and large scale painted walls INSA creates momentary installations in public spaces.
In this set of photographic works INSA orchestrates a conflicting dialogue between all the elements and explicitly subordinates the value of his own street art to both the possessed object of the bike and the overtly sexualized female presence. Thus questioning our individual perceptions of ownership of public space, of sexuality and of belonging(s).
Mysterious paper sculptures - Central Station Blog post
The curious tale of anonymous art made of books and left in libraries.
