Poetry bombing

For O, Miami, a poetry festival held in April, Agustina Woodgate visited various thrift stores and stitched small labels with various verses of poems printed on them, such as this one by Li Po: “Life is a huge dream why work so hard?” And that is your deep thought for the upcoming weekend.

DC Comics introduces gay characters

We’re not comics fans, but even we know DC Comics. So now that they’re introducing a bunch of gay characters this fall, it’ll be nice for us to finally have a serious counterpoint to SNL’s Ambiguously Gay Duo. According to The Advocate:

DC Comics grabbed headlines last June when the company announced its entire line of comic books would be overhauled with 52 all-new #1 issues in September. Not only would iconic characters such as Superman and Wonder Woman restart with a fresh number, but costumes and origins for the entire universe of characters would be updated as well.

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Abstract sandwich paintings

I’m liking artist Dan Kenneally’s “Lunchbox” series of acrylic paintings, which are “light-hearted, abstract sandwich paintings that use a single colored stripe to represent each ingredient.” It’s a pretty extensive collection that covers a wide variety of sandwiches for all different meal times. [Via]

A spooky story told using CAPTCHA words

Captcha from Gabrielle de Vietri on Vimeo. Gabrielle de Vietri narrates this haunting story using the nonsensical words found in CAPTCHA, the authentication system in place on many websites to try to weed out spam bots from real people. (Or to make a cinematic analogy, a text version of the Voight-Kampff test administered in the [...]

Why did Warhol paint Campbell soup cans?

Christopher Knight of The Los Angeles Times wrote this interesting exploration into what compelled Andy Warhol to paint Campbell soup cans, which “was first displayed publicly at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in July 1962,” as opposed to painting countless other canned goods that reflected the mass consumer US culture. When asked Warhol’s “canned” [...]

Consumer brand badges

Hope Chu adapted the military’s ribbons and decorations and created these “consumer badges” for her MFA thesis at RISD. Display your brand loyalties proudly!

Artist creates touristy NYC statue

Selected for this year’s Art In Odd Places festival on Oct 1-10, 2011 in New York City, artist Leon Reid IV is planning on adorning the statue of George Washington in Union Square with “large scale props such as an “I Love NY” hat, camera, NYC subway map, and local shopping bags” in a piece [...]

Renewable energy as art: the Bakken Museum’s Green Energy Art Garden

The Sonic Articulation of Sunbeams from Ben Moren on Vimeo.

A solar array, or a wind farm, can certainly have aesthetic appeal… but the visual interplay between the technology and its surroundings, or the beauty inherent in those panels and turbines themselves, usually isn’t high on the priority list of installers. The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, which is dedicated to “exploring the mysteries of our electric world,” thought that beauty needed further exploration… and commissioned local artists to create works that “demonstrate a new, creative approach to using alternative energy sources.”

Coffee cup design a day

Bernat Cuni took the basic coffee mug and designed thirty different concepts for his One Coffee Cup a Day project. Most of the designs remind me of the flawed function product project that I previously blogged about here.

The art of flawed functional products

For his art project titled “Err,” Jeremy Hutchison contacted various factories around the world manufacturing various products with a seemingly bizarre request: make him a non-functional version of their product. There’s obviously a deeper subtext here, as he explains below, but on surface I can’t get over how hilarious they look, such as these sunglasses [...]

Matthias Heiderich’s Berlin

I am obsessed with Matthias Heiderich’s cropped square photos of Berlin’s buildings. Using color and composition, the photographer creates patterns and abstract images that may not obviously be architecture and the city’s skylines. Having just returned from Berlin last week it’s quite remarkable just how perfectly he captures the modern feel and cool, geometric shapes of [...]

Cindy “yawn” Sherman at the Venice Biennale

In “ILLUMInations,” the main exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale, lies a small gallery with walls covered floor to ceiling by larger-life-than photographs of Cindy Sherman in dress-up, framed by a background of blown-up images of 18th-century pastoral engravings. In typical Sherman style, she uses wigs and costumes to assume different roles, though in the case of “Murals,” the roles aren’t as clear as her usual easily identifiable stereotypes. First, we have Sherman in a baggy, Band-Aid colored body suit of naked woman. The breasts and pubic hair are rudely constructed. They look like something a child would make if children made naked body suits.She holds a sword at her crotch, suggestively pointed upwards, ever ready to juxtapose images of female sexuality with the power traditionally ascribed to the male phallus – an association so obvious and overdone by this point it teeters on boredom.

Alphabetized Bible

“Alphabetized Bible” is a clever re-conceptualization by Tauba Auerbach of the King James Bible that “investigates the idea that any piece of writing, no matter its intellectual weight, is nothing more than a collection of letters.” The artist deconstructs the characters of the bible and prioritizes them in alphabetical order. She explains: The intention of [...]

Giant comb bike rack

The founders of Knowhow Shop LA, a design studio and cooperative artist space, created and built this 400-pound bike rack for a public art initiative in Roanoke, Virginia. It reminds me of a functional utilitarian Claes Oldenburg piece.

Remembering Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly ranks high on my list of favorite artists, right alongside his friend and fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he shared a studio as well as a propensity for cat scratch marks of paint and pencil. His seemingly haphazard compositions have held me captivated in museums, where I have stood fixated, letting my eyes roam his great expanse of canvas until my feet became so tired that I actually sat down on the floor – an ardent devotee. This particular experience happened early in high school, when seeing a Twombly after years of studying only formalist, realistic and namely old portraiture and landscapes left me stunned, transfixed, as if anchored to the space in front of the painting by a force beyond my own.

Ai Weiwei’s photos of New York City

Currently on display at NYC’s Asia Society Museum are a selection of 227 photographs (curated from thousands) snapped by artist Ai Weiwei of daily life during his residency here in the Big Apple in the 1980s. This is the first exhibition of his NYC photographs outside of Beijing. “Mr. Ai worked as a street artist [...]

Netflix envelope art

The notion of using the red Netflix envelopes as a blank canvas is a genius idea, especially for chronic doodlers like myself. Doodlers Anonymous compiled some great examples from various professional and amateur artists. I especially like the sea-scape above by Jovino. This might motivate me to finally getting around to watching my Netflix dvd [...]

New fiction (and music and film): “Lola, California” by Edie Meidav

The amazing writer Edie Meidav (who also happens to be our friend and neighbor) is out today with a new novel: “Lola, California”, called “brilliant” and “awesome” by Publisher’s Weekly. Meidav is such a force of inspiration that art practically gets spontaneously generated in her wake: above is a beautifully haunting short film created by Snapdragon that’s inspired by “Lola” along with Meidav’s narration; and here is music inspired by the book from Kevin Salem, who calls it “part soundtrack for the reader, part songs inspired by the text … and part music inspired by the cultural identity of the novel.” Below is one of two excerpts from “Lola, California” that Meidav is generously allowing us to publish here — this one about a rape on a Greek island. Stay tuned next week for the second excerpt about two friends go-go dancing. Both are compelling creepy and deeply moving, even without the context of the full novel:

Global currency

Tapping into the paranoid beliefs of conspiracy theorists and extremists who suspect the pending arrival of a unified new world order is Istvan Laszlo’s recent work conceptualizing what currency would look like in that new system.

Jigsaw puzzle mural

Gerhard Mayer delicately pieces together and layers sections of various jigsaw puzzles to create fantastical large murals. The artist also applies the same technique using different mediums, such as postcards. His large scale wood installation is impressive as well. [Via]

Photo series: Switcheroos

I’m really liking Vancouver based photographer Hana’s ongoing photo series “Switcheroos” that juxtaposes identically posed photos of two people after they’ve swapped each other’s clothing. There’s a subtext here that seems to touch upon or critique issues of normative expectations of gender lines, but really I can’t get over how hilarious the dude looks in [...]

Pipe organ ATM

Duo Allora & Calzadilla created this interactive installation, which has been very popular at this year’s Venice Biennale. It’s a working ATM embedded within a pipe organ that is programmed to play a unique tune for each user: “Theories have even been circulating that the bigger someone’s balance, the more elaborate and longer the composition, [...]

Scaffolding without the building

Living in a city where at times it seems half the buildings are hidden under gross scaffolding, I appreciate the alternative perspective presented by Vienna-based artist Liddy Scheffknecht in this photo series where “all architectural elements except the scaffolding were removed from the photograph of a building under renovation.”

Caleb Charland’s light photography

Artist Caleb Charland creates some great light photography, such as the one above with lighters. His pictures are even more impressive considering that they are are created in-camera and without any other digital manipulation or touch-up. [Via]

Wearable art

Fashion line The Rodnik Band has an entertaining couture collection of dresses and outfits directly inspired by famous pop artists and their artwork. Only dissonance here is the disturbing subtext of the dress using Duchamp’s urinal… [Via]