fanaatastic

rabia

2011-12-29T07:17:00.000-08:00

...and they tried to cure solitude.

i'm still thinking about this.

"Brothers, my peace is in my aloneness.My Beloved is alone with me there, always.I have found nothing in all the worldsThat could match His love,This love that harrows the sands of my desert."

confessionals always end up mythologizing. i think that idea is solidifying as a truth for me.

too much of anything can't be healthy; including solitude.?

prozac nation

2011-12-27T07:27:00.001-08:00

the book is much much better than the little independent film. they didn't capture any of the glamorization or mythologizing components so well threaded throughout a life so taken over by the persistence of pain and abject misery as the book does.
and what better way to revision life and conquer future obstacles.

interview with mr. dylan about the visual arts and his painting

2011-12-27T07:25:00.000-08:00

"...other than the world we know."

animation show highlights

2011-11-22T06:06:00.000-08:00

1. Jan Svankmajer - dimensions of dialogue

2. lotte reiniger - the adventures of prince achmed

3. wan brothers - princess iron fan

4. max fleisher - betty boop

5. lumiere brothers - serpentine dance

New romanticism -- metamodernism

2011-10-24T15:38:00.000-07:00

Love this idea -- though it's a little like being bi-polar.
Ha. I understand it quite easily at a superficial level and
look forward to studying it more... I happily feel my own
ideas fall Into this...would like to explore it more.
There is an accompanying sense of renewal and hope.

barnett newman's voice of fire

2011-10-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

This is the first painting i saw [up close, 'live'] that made a huge impact on me. a school trip when i was 15 to the national gallery. A very controversial painting because of it's cost - 1.8 million spent - and it's misunderstood simplicity.

i don't think this is frivolous spending. the museum educator taught us how to look at it, and i was really overwhelmed by the experience. i lingered on after everyone else moved to the next section of the museum, and i just stared it, actually able to see the "fire" erupting in the middle stripe of the painting, because of the complimentary colour and size used in the adjacent stripes. it is possible that it might have scientific explanations -- something that i happened to come across a few years later.

in my head, like my second painting of the beginning of the more serious painting

2011-10-09T09:59:00.000-07:00

it's good when your art makes people uneasy. when critics have a hard time with it.
especially when they hate it.
is that right?
so does that mean you're avant-garde or just mediocre/bad ?
if you were mediocre, they wouldn't care enough to hate it. is that right?
should i just keep playing into the fantasy in my head?
because that is what i like to do most.
maybe that's my real motivation for doing anything worthwhile.

and so you just keep going, and keep doing it, because you have to. and in posterity might one find out, and not necessarily you, if it meant anything or if it was just an occupation of your time to disappear and fall to waste.

my next project is to work on this gigantic canvas that i've had for awhile. will probably be working on it through the winter to the spring until my trip abroad, finally.and it feels so cozy and beautiful thinking about it; like it's exactly what i should be doing, and couldn't be spending my time doing anything better.
and it's a beautiful, beautiful sweet subject that i will probably love looking at.

shirin neshat

2011-05-26T03:01:00.000-07:00

video: shirin neshat: art in exile

nir hod - the 'genius' portraits

2011-05-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

hmmm

"the kids are alright? the paintings of nir hod"
"That [photo] was a big influence to me," says Hod of a snapshot of former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan sharing a cigarette after signing the 1994 peace agreement. "It's almost like Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent meeting in Milan." The artist is intrigued by the way the cigarette adds elements of spontaneity and civility. "If Obama took a picture with a leader like that it would be such a craze, but look how interesting it is, just because of the cigarette. There's some magic here."

"precocious and melancholic"
"Nir Hod has opposed the ideology that labels sumptuousness an esthetic sin. His work openly substitutes the pleasure principle and a fluid multiplicity of selves for the old notions of high seriousness and personal authenticity."

SF soon

2011-05-06T03:45:00.000-07:00

1. People are exhausting
2. I should care about selling paintings so I can fund my trips

at the vag and other pics

2011-04-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

1. i watched 'la jetee' by chris marker.

2.

I can't believe this starts in may and I'm here in April

2011-04-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

I will have to come back this summer

Vancouver art gallery

i am usually not vengeful

2011-04-17T06:42:00.000-07:00

but i really want revenge. someone stealing something of yours, and then pretending not to steal it. when it's obvious, both physically and metaphysically, that it was stolen. and obvious to more than just one person. the only thing i can do is take comfort in the fact that there is karma. maybe one day i will be able to hurt him.

post-colonialist theory

2011-04-17T05:10:00.000-07:00

this is the theoretical hook of every serious artist of non-european descent in the western world. the intellectual trinity of post-colonialist theory: 1. edward said 2. homi k. bhabha 3. gayatri spivak. i have to admit, bhabha's theories of hybridity and the ambivalent third space really hit me. it was exactly how i was feeling about my life, and what i felt the meaning was of what was ending up on the canvas.

henri rousseau [aka self-analysisII]

2011-04-17T01:46:00.000-07:00

starting so late in life and being untrained, my work will always look naive. with a blind optimism, and sympathy to religion, belief in some sort of noble aspects to man, life and death -- away from cynicism, the unaesthetic and meaninglessness, i will probably never fit into any contemporary art scene. i would just like to continue to paint and have these little hidden away shows. to be seen and not seen. selling work is not really a priority, and becoming any sort of spectacle is very unappealing. the only thing i'm interested in being right now with my art is relevant.

chris marker

2011-04-05T08:08:00.000-07:00

"passengers"

i know you want to hide all the time, but that just didn't work out

2011-04-03T06:05:00.000-07:00

"zeeny, eclecticism, hybridity. the optimism of those ideas! the certainty on which they rested: of will, of choice! but zeeny mine, life just happens to you: like an accident. No: it happens to you as a result of your condition. Not choice, but - at best - process, and, at worst, shocking, total change. Newness: he had sought a different kind, but this was what he got."

'the morning hours'

2011-04-01T04:44:00.000-07:00

in the name of God, beneficent, merciful 1. by the morning hours 2. and by the night when it is stillest 3. your Lord has not forsaken thee, nor does He hate thee 4. and verily the latter portion will be better for thee than the former 5. and verily thy Lord will give unto thee so that thou wilt be content 6. did He not find thee an orphan and protect [thee]? 7. did He not find thee wandering and direct [thee]? 8. did He not find thee destitute and enrich [thee]? 9. therefore, the orphan oppress not 10. the beggar drive not away 11. therefore of the bounty of thy Lord be thy discourse

basquiat - radiant child film

2011-03-26T07:17:00.000-07:00

"Inverse asceticism, apparently, is PC-speak for addiction." [this is not from the movie]. the most interesting part is his crossing out letters, words, items. so the art world tried to make him into an other, caged, wild pet.

"...and all this explaining is tedious" [unlike when making art]

2011-03-24T05:34:00.001-07:00

Julian Schnabel's 'miral', one minute interview.

language of art lecture [notes]

2011-03-21T14:37:00.000-07:00

the view of old european immigrants.

art itself is not a language but an insight. the truth is not told, it is shown. it's purpose is the improvement of human experience. it is not didactic. when philosophy fails, use poetry. it can serve a revolution and be propaganda. it is the quality and not the literal content or the colour arrangement that compels. art has her own language - a silent language - but is not a language herself]. it involves meticulous execution and colour choosing.

the self is a limited universe. in midieval art, there was communication without effort and artists were teachers. the eastern european saint icon was a window of communication. renaissance art was true to life and had depth and volume. in the 19th century the pre-raphaelites had a language of flowers. so did manet. lemon=sour disposition; mirror=vanity or self-knowledge. the reformation killed the renaissance. the counter reformation was an uncreative period with church propaganda. the ecstasy of st. terese. [exception to the otherwise mediocre].

art of 1600s Holland read like a book with the sophisticated bourgeois. the 1900s bourgeois academic painting told short stories and anecdotes, until the impressionists arrived. the pre-raphaelites exhibited passionate emotion restricted by victorian culture and was rich in symbolism. rosetti painted elizabeth, and jane morris as narcisstic beauties.

art improves our skill in handling the world.

impressionists caught contemporary life. lower, middle class girls - a new emerging class - who could spend on leisure. 1860s france - joie de vie. manet painted the scandalous 'olympia'. 'nana'. clear language. ridiculed for painting a contemporary kept woman.

baudelaire said that the artist creates a universal language. work, suffering, gift. art is always in opposition to its predecessor.

now: language has fallen through, where only the ego remains, and critics are left to speak.

cezanne can express ideas in colour. can drink it. can lose yourself in it. there was a new way to perceive nature. a new literacy that was away from the academy. the louvre shows us the dictionary. how do we develop our language skills of art? by comparing, comparing, comparing.

every great artist invents a new language in opposition to themaster and to the current scheme of things. interpreting every aspect of reality. the artist creates a new scheme of things.

mirror photos

2011-03-11T02:08:00.000-08:00

quote

2011-02-12T08:16:00.000-08:00

...He also goes on to point out that, within this poetical realm, like that of the subconscious, such haunting and powerful images exist autonomously and for their own sake. 'Do we still have to recall' he asks, 'that the life of creatures populating the surface of canvases and the world of poetry obeys conditions of life different from creatures populating the surface of the earth? That plastic and poetic physiology is not the physiology of living beings? That the plastic or poetic of life of a painting or of a poem obeys other laws than those of the circulation of the blood? That in the plastic or poetic world, a decapitated figure is not a figure without a head?' (Salvador Dalí, quoted in ibid., p. 67).

albrecht durer

2011-02-06T06:34:00.000-08:00

post mod?

2011-01-29T06:13:00.000-08:00

post modern art = bad
post modern theory = not so bad

the Roses

2011-01-26T05:44:00.000-08:00

by American artist Will Ryman, in nyc, jan. 25, 2011

kamrooz aram

2011-01-08T05:40:00.000-08:00

iranian-american painter based in ny

"The idea of controlled chance is found in traditional Persian music, as well as in American Jazz, in which the musician improvises over distinct melodic systems and specific rhythmic patterns. Likewise, the paintings start with a grid, which sometimes disappears completely, yet still affects the painting in its development"

"These paintings are representative of an exploration of the parts (i.e., struggle, contradiction, transformation, longing, etc.) as well as the search for the whole (i.e., the beautiful, complete, balanced image). In these paintings, Islamic geometric patterns are combined with loosely painted organic forms, at times deliberately breaking the steady rhythms, other times quite randomly allowing the painting to paint itself."

"I want to emphasize the struggle and contradiction one experiences in attempt to preserve traditions while at the same time enjoying the nontraditional contemporary Western culture that at times seems to contradict almost every aspect of the tradition. In such an attempt one is almost inevitable left in a position that reeks of hypocrisy."

eugene atget

2010-11-20T09:57:00.000-08:00

unintentional surrealist

2010-11-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

"They'd thrown themselves into it as if it were the sea, and now, just like a treacherous sea, surrealism threatens to sweep them out to the open ocean where sharks of madness cruise".

from 'une vague des reves', louis aragon

remodernism

2010-10-07T21:57:00.000-07:00

ok, so i found what i was looking for. almost exactly. [it took 10 years?]. but has anything good come out of it in terms of visual art?

the manifesto

what has happened in the last 10 years with this? what else has cropped up?

frida kahlo

2010-09-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

i wondered why i waited to post about her. now i know why. there's no one like her anymore.

"They are so damn 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them anymore....I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those 'artistic' bitches of Paris." [on Andre Breton and the European surrealists]

"I never knew I was a surrealist till Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was."

"They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."

"I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration."

i really want to get a pipe

2010-09-04T15:35:00.000-07:00

david sylvester - art critic [1924-2001]

2010-08-30T07:17:00.000-07:00

interview with sylvester by bbc3

pre-ww2 much more interesting than post-ww2.

japanese art

2010-08-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

edo period [within which originated ukiyo-e 'the floating world' wood block prints representing geishas, kabuki, courtesans, sumo;]- 17th- 20th c

meiji period [meiji restoration ended the edo period and japan's seclusion; hence inciting the 'japonism' phenomenon in the west , especially france, at this time]- 1868-1912

asia week exhibitions

william baziotes

2010-08-21T07:07:00.000-07:00

shezad dawood

2010-08-20T05:04:00.000-07:00

shez

so the neon lights in arabic, spelling out God's names, are a spin off of bruce nauman's work.

i'm pretty sure 'al-fataha' translates to 'the opener'. yet its labelled as 'the judge' on the saatchi gallery website.
the site will tell you this is a rejection of the idea of the 'clash of civilizations', and that it is a synthesis of the east west dichotomy that dawood shares in.
but i see an allusion to the burning bush story/myth/ religious narrative. a miraculous, neon-lit spectacle entangled in desolation; a glowing advertisement from within the dry, wild west frontier. it describes the current state of meeting of these two cultures.

His ideas on sufism are written here - a commentary on his artwork involving vintage praktica cameras.

this dude's work is really starting to fascinate me.

but, not suprisingly, in interview, seems pretty pretentious.

[over-used words when reading about art: 1) subversive 2) pretentious].

bob dylan - painter

2010-08-18T04:30:00.001-07:00

favela villa broncos, 2010

paul gauguin

2010-08-16T08:03:00.000-07:00

2010-08-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

rene char: on the perils of too much clarity:

"ne pas effeuiller le coeur de la rose"

[do not strip the heart of the rose].

nollywood babylon

2010-08-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

first of all lancelot is a bad-ass. As the movie director that is followed in this documentary, he has a burning ambition, passion and love for the movie industry, including all its unwelcoming elements, that can carry you through the entire film in an effortless wave.

they say america has colonialised the world through its movies and music. but the nigerian movie makers assert they aren't copyists, and communicate their life as it is. the country is a continuing integration of indigenous roots involving a large degree of occultism with christian european colonialism as well as islamic 'evangelism'. Although the influence of islam in the film was trite to non-existent, the clash/reconciliation between western christian ideals and african ancestral custom was said to be in a transition phase. and maybe at the moment seemingly in a perpetual transition phase that could take generations to overcome.

[this is the whole pastiche thing again].

self-analysis

2010-08-10T07:13:00.000-07:00

there must be a collective consciousness or psychology because my paintings i can tell now are falling into the realm of pastiche and i have only just recently begun to study postmodernism, while i've been working on my paintings for a few years now.

its a mash up of genres and eras but not involved with any sort of satire or irony. just blankly eclectic. in a critique i was told it was in fact post-modern because it was eclectic, multicultural, but infused with contemporary imagery. he suggested i add imagery of violence and feminism because it would be 'relevant'. but i don't know why i would want to perpetuate stereotypes. i also have no intention of being subversive. it just 'is'. and maybe it is an empty conglomerate.

and maybe it really is reflective of a state of pleuralism devoid of substance that we find ourselves in.

and maybe i've fallen into a place of some sort of reverse-orientalism, being a product of migration and multiple past diasporas, finding myself nowhere and with only a faded, deja vu sense of any connection with history.

although in my critique, he asserted that it was 'new', its not really new, just a product of my time and place, and definitely not close to anything avant-garde, which has been noted by others many times. there is no 'edginess'. i am not aware of what the avant-garde style is at the moment, if any. In the pseudo-avant-garde, technical proficiency is absent, and there is a continual spin on conceptualism and appropriation, which i have no proclivity to indulge myself in.

a true synthesis into something new is the challenge.

what are you trying to get at? i don't know.

2010-08-01T07:08:00.001-07:00

slc can be surreal

2010-07-29T10:38:00.001-07:00

marcel duchamp

2010-07-28T09:07:00.000-07:00

born today.

yves klein

2010-07-27T17:01:00.001-07:00

monochrome painting - reaction to the weariness of existentialist skepticism. outside of time and history, without beginning or end.

'to sense the soul, without explanation, without words...' y.k.

fire paintings. monotone symphony.

value in posterity has been lost. its about here and now. we're closing in on pop art.

i don't know if its a fraud. but there is beauty.
yvesklein.org

ikb - international klein blue - rubbed all over the main character in 'pierrot le fou'. hmm.

gardens

2010-07-12T01:12:00.000-07:00

"everything that is most eccentric in man, the gypsy in him, can surely be summed up in these two syllables: garden. Not even when he started adorning himself with diamonds or blowing into brass instruments did any stranger or more baffling idea occur to him than when he invented the gardens."

louis aragon, 'paris peasant'

henri matisse

2010-07-11T19:05:00.000-07:00

the first manifesto vs. the second manifesto of surrealism

2010-07-02T06:18:00.000-07:00

first manifesto:

psychic automatism

2nd manifesto:

the meeting of two disparate realities

the first sentence

2010-07-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I "haunt."

diane arbus

2010-07-01T17:25:00.000-07:00

uncanny in the sense that her photos are of the marginalized in society. the photographs invoke suprise, but there isn't an idea of an intersection between the conscious and subconscious fields. horror but not surreal.

what he will say about her

2010-06-26T10:36:00.000-07:00

1. i have seen her fern-coloured eyes open mornings on a world where the beating of hope's great wings is scarcely distinct from the other sounds which are those of terror and, upon such a world, i had yet seen eyes do nothing but close.
[she can be like this because she is 'voluntarily remote from the last raft' at the moment of drowning.]

2. everything that permits us to live another's life without ever desiring to obtain more from him than he gives, so that it is quite enough to see him move or be still, speak or be silent, wake or sleep, no longer existed for me, had never existed: this was only too certain.

3.

pre-manipulation

2010-06-22T17:50:00.000-07:00

i.e. at the moment its just point and shoot

dora maar

2010-06-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

NYT article

weird stuff she says

2010-06-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

1. [a fountain in the Tuileries] : "those are your thoughts and mine. look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it's still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there's that broken spurt again, that fall...and so on, indefinitely."
[where did she get that image from he exclaims, when the same idea was written in a book he just read that she couldn't possibly have seen yet].

2. "time is a tease. time is a tease - because everything has to happen in its own time".
[but during this wandering excursion he gets bored].

3.

kati horna

2010-06-14T05:09:00.000-07:00

Barbican - The Surreal House

2010-06-13T16:35:00.000-07:00

art event details at the Barbican in London

i'm bored of post-modernism, i hope a new era begins soon

2010-06-10T15:45:00.000-07:00

the dustbin of art history

i miss chicago

2010-06-07T08:30:00.000-07:00

"According to Tasset, “I hope both EYE and CARDINAL change the everyday experience for pedestrians and drivers along State Street. The image of the flying bird is quieting and humble in contrast to the commercial bustle surrounding it, while the enormous scale of the EYE serves to miniaturize its surroundings. Although EYE and CARDINAL are unique works and do not depend on each other, the two works are linked formally; by the red, white and blue color pallet as well as the repetition of the eye in the bird close up. The juxtaposition of these two archetypal images with the city of Chicago as a backdrop should create a grand surreal picture, in the spirit of Magritte and Dali.”" [excerpt from art daily]

subodh gupta

2010-06-05T06:35:00.000-07:00

gupta's profile at the saatchi gallery

another duchamp descendant they say.

my immediate impression is a reference to a stereotype of the overwhelmed south-asian housewife. there's a dichotomist view of the woman though; the giant, shiny, metal tiffin tins and other house-hold kitchen wares bubbling over in a jewel-like studded mass indicate some sort of glamorous but subservient role to the imagined figure.

the inherent idea is something akin to those 1930s kitsch calendar girl images.

pors and rao

2010-06-05T05:50:00.000-07:00

soren pors [danish] + aparna rao [indian]

"the uncle phone" [date 2004?], apparently "This two meter long phone was made to express the unique way that her uncle uses a regular telephone; it requires two people to operate- one to dial and another to speak." [source: a couple places on the internet that i'm not going to bother citing].

on first appearance this reminded me unequivocally of a south asian in a foreign land, recalling an immigrant's far-reaching connecting bridge to their parent nation.

there's also no denying some sort of phallic symbol analogy which i can't further explain as of yet.

remedios varo

2010-05-30T06:11:00.000-07:00

link

meret oppenheim

2010-05-30T06:06:00.000-07:00