Light the pong

Marlene Dumas: taking sex seriously

Marlene Dumas, whose watercolor painting was featured here a few days ago, is worth going back to.
Not because she is the most expensive living female artist. And not because she "embraces the totality of the human experience" (wow, people still actually write this sort of stuff...).

Oh, bloody hell.
Oh, bloody hell.
I am as filthy as I am pure.
I think things, imagine things, crave for them or despise them.
This explicitness, this seeing more, or need to see more, is what brings me here.
To this site, to this artist. To this constant search for a name, a form, a way of channeling thirst.
Is it about sex? Is it about the blatancy of exposition?
Is it about humanity? About the loss of innocence? The search for meaning?
Is it about who we are? About our place in the order?
It certainly is about where the technique takes us. Yes, the technique. The way of putting things, of joining the clay.






One thing that irritates me is the often-repeated idea that Dumas is an artist "who knows no taboos". This is not only silly and sensationalist - it takes away the pleasure of discovering the exact lines of her taboo, her notions of decency, quite present and rich. Look at the above pictures as at a map of impossibilities, of what is not said. The form as subtraction.

See more Marlene Dumas here, here and here.

Technorati: painting, erotic art, sex, erotic art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Two self-portraits

created through the apparently famous automatic net art generator...

Two African portraits

found on Artthribe:


Mustafa Maluka, I've decided my fate (2007, oil and acrylic on canvas)

Marlene Dumas, Portrait of Kendell Geers (2004, watercolour)

Is it just me, or is the skin a haunting issue? This transparency, this impossibility of getting there, of touching, of having it as a given. This need for nuance, and nuance, and indefinition, redefinition, something other than definition. The color. The need of color. And the need, especially in the case of Maluka (which, by the way, in colloquial Portuguese means 'crazy'), to give skin a depth that surprizes in the flat world around it... And the calm, but not happy, look.
What is color? What is left of color? Isn't it impressive it can still cream, after all this history, after all this art?

Flexible sofa

(via)

Art for all - and vice versa

If you bring it in, we'll hang it, said the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, which is about to move to another space. The reaction to the initiative, called aptly Free For All, was overwhelming: dozens of people cueing up in the cold weather with their works. The only criterium of selection was having actually brought the work oneself. One may have doubts whether it was really a sign of 'support for the gallery' on the part of the people waiting in line, as one of the gallery workers suggests. After all - the fine arts are a finely guarded institution that isn't easy to break in. But it is a great and courageous initiative indeed. Chaos? Oh, please, let's not treat every single initiative so dead serious, as if it were the Great Finale of Art. I wonder how the catalogue looked. Nearly 3000 works by about 1300 artists.

Now that's what I call a great social art installation.

Challenging the world, one billboard at a time

He's been around for a while. In 2002, for instance, he made the world a better place by putting flags on high-tension electricity lines.
Or another delicious installation, called The Real Thing, where he distilled Coca-Cola to get drinkable water:
Helmut Smits is a fighter. He does not allow the idea that one cannot be heard in the contemporary world. He seems to think there is plenty of space, and plenty of ways of speaking up. If The Real Thing looks too symbolic and gallery-restricted for you, and the flags are nice, but you're afraid other might just not get it, then try Pamphlet, a simple device that allows you to share whatever thoughts or ideas you have with the world - just type it on the computer, click on 'Send', and the pamphlet will be dropped from the 10th story of a building.


Also recently, Smits decided it was time to react against the constant pollution of publicity in the city. So he dressed as a town hall worker and went out there, in front of a billboard, and planted a tree.

The idea is this:

He's had some problems before, like with this balloon-based cloud that was prohibited because of air space regulations...

I suppose this won't get him into trouble, because by the time the tree gets serious, the billboard is long gone. Which begs the question: should guerrilla art be effective? Does their effectiveness lie in the word-to-post strategy?
Okay, it's a bluff. But isn't this a great goal for activist art-making: to create a bluff that becomes reality?

(via 1 & 2)