alistairhenning

“Trends in Political Photographs” – 2011 — BagNews

alistairhenning — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 07:55:01 +0000

More thoughts on Droog Lab’s ‘Luxury of the North’, from Antoniuk and Jaworska

alistairhenning — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:05:37 +0000

On Thursday, December 8, 2011, Edmonton’s design community was treated to a co-presentation between Droog Lab, the University of Alberta and M.A.D.E. in Edmonton.

The purpose of Droog’s visit was to discuss the Luxury of the North project in the form of a lecture and panel debate:

Here, there, everywhere by Agata Jaworska (Droog);
Arctic Imports by Pirjo Haikola (The Why Factory); and
Productivity of Nature by Christien Meindertsma;
followed by panel discussion with Tim Antoniuk.

Last year, as part of its Here, there, everywhere lab series, Droog Lab teamed up with Tim Antoniuk, head of the University of Alberta’s industrial design department, and a small contingent of Dutch and Canadian designers. Together, they traveled to Nunavut for 10 days, bringing back with them novel approaches to everyday life.

“The aim of the Droog Lab is to see how ways of living in different parts of the world can inspire new directions for the future of design,” says Renny Ramakers, co-founder and director of Droog and initiator of the project. “The Canadian North is known to be harsh. We wanted to see how its extreme qualities might influence new city concepts and urban luxuries elsewhere.”

Luxury of the North is part of the Droog Lab series, Here, there, everywhere, which investigates how people in daily situations worldwide can inspire new directions for the future of design.

According to Tim Antoniuk speaking about his experience working with Droog Labs, “Droog is one of the most innovative design studios in the world. They really helped change the way a lot of people, a lot of schools, a lot of companies see design. They helped define what Dutch design is. They have a pretty long history.”

Antoniuk recalls “This interesting discussion really early on as we were forming the project. I was in Amsterdam speaking with all these leaders of Dutch design in one room, and I asked ‘What do you think about Canadian design?’ And there was no reply.

“I eventually pressed them, and the general consensus was ‘We think Canada’s really open, light, and sustainable …’ and there were all these adjectives that weren’t about products, they were about environment, about a state of a nation in a way.

“Which I thought was really cool. If you think ‘what’s Italian design?’ you think Ferrari, you think Armani, Dutch design you think Droog, German design it’s Porsche, Braun, French it’s couture and fashion, but Canadian design? … And that really struck me.

“So I thought,” Antoniuk continues, “let’s go to Canada for something utterly Canadian, which is way up north, and let’s find out how these people live, and how they live sustainably.

According to Antoniuk, “A lot of the project was going up there with no design agenda, but going up there to explore new concepts of living. There’s all these neat lessons that we learned, that we’re abstracting into the contemporary world.

Agata Jaworska of Droog Lab explains that they “pick project themes that are a hypothesis of what we think we might be able to learn from that particular place, with value for the rest of the world.

“We just thought that Canada’s North has unique things to teach the rest of the world about the theme of survival, Jaworska continues. “Conditions are very harsh, and we saw ways of building housing, ways of dealing with transport, ways of eating, surviving on food, that were quire unique.

Of many unusual experiences from his time in the North, Antoniuk shares one particular insight relating to urban design and how it may (or may not) support culture: “ In these remote northern communities, there’s really high rates of alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, and suicide. And a lot of people have said well, it’s because there’s gross problems with overcrowding in housing.

“Effectively, white man came in and gave super small little Western-style houses on stilts, and then up to four generations of family members will live in one house. So you’ll get fourteen people in one super-small little house. And when you’re got 24 hours of darkness and you’re not going out much, problems can be created. So some social psychologists and others have said ‘oh, well the problem is because of overcrowding. We’ve got to give them bigger houses’. Which, may be somewhat true.

“But in speaking with an elder, she said ‘The southers gave us this housing, and it has nothing to do with our culture. There’s no place for storytelling, no place for the kids, no place for our cultural rituals.’ And that really struck me, because when you think here’s a culture that’s got tens of thousands of years of planning for small spaces: they lived in igloos for thousands of years. We gave them southern style housing that helped to destroy who they were or are. And the opposite is that, well, they can really teach us a lot.

Jaworsa also brought back stories: “We had kids who told us their favorite food was ‘sea eyeballs’! It was surprising to see people taking raw seal meet in Ziploc bags, and taking it out with you for the day.

Jaworska was also surprised by “The fact that when there was only daylight and no night time, kids were out at 2 in the morning fishing, with no parental supervison and they were completely fine. They could navigate their landscape and fish and play and there’s ice and lots of dangerous things that could happen, and somehow there’s this kind of social network of people, even kids looking after other kids, so that they manage without the parents. And I think in the south and elsewhere in Canada we’re much more careful with our children.”

“The project is equally relevant in the southern part of Canada as it is to the rest of the world,” Jaworska feels. “It’s not Canada in general that the project comes from, but the North specifically. And so then I think people in Toronto may be more familiar with Inuit than people in Amsterdam or elsewhere generally speaking, but people in Toronto have more in common with people in Amsterdam than they do with Inuit in the North.

From the projects, Jaworska asserts, “The big message is how looking at different communities, such as the north, can inspire future design. It’s important for readers to understand that we don’t go to the North to design for the North and to work with the Inuit or local people to instigate change there. That makes our approach unique: we’re going there to take something that has value for the rest of the world.

And was there an overall message Antoniuk would like people to take away from the project, and the symposium? “It’s really necessary for people to start to think in a new way, to find new contexts of innovation. The world is changing so fast, and so much has been lost. It’s not about regaining our past, it’s about regaining a little of our humanity in a world that’s changing so incredibly quickly.

How Museums Have Become Playgrounds – The 2011 Culture Awards — New York Magazine

alistairhenning — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 04:24:48 +0000

The Long Slide

Museums as playgrounds.

By Jerry Saltz
Published Dec 4, 2011

ShareThis

(Photo: Jesse Untracht Oakner)

J’accuse museums of bullshit! Of bogusly turning themselves into smash-hit consumer circuses, box-office sensations of voyeurism and hipster showbiz. This year, the institution-critiquing art known as Relational Aesthetics—essentially audience-participation art, often work that moves, lights up, or involves living nude beings—entered its decadent phase. Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity, gizmos, eating, hanging out, things that make noise—all are now the norm, often edging out much else.

I place the beginning of the end at “theanyspacewhatever,” the 2008 Guggenheim group show of “subversive” critiques that remains the most indulgent act of museum masturbation I’ve ever seen—and I lived through the Thomas Krens years. This year, though, the movement went completely moribund. Take as an example Marina Abramovic’s The Survival MoCA Dinner, staged last month for more than 750 people at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. This piece of mega-kitsch included naked women, supine with skeletons atop them, on dinner tables while attendees ate. (One guest reportedly wisecracked “full Brazilian at six o’clock.”) Shirtless male pallbearers carried shrouded bodies about. Although it was only a fund-raiser, it recalled Abramovic’s silly 2010 MoMA spectacle that made sitting and staring at the artist into the narcissistic endurance art du jour. (A group of art-world scolds, including Yvonne Rainer, Douglas Crimp, Mary Kelly, Rachel Harrison, and John Yau, all signed a peevish letter denouncing Abramovic’s L.A. event before it was staged. That too came off obnoxious—less thoughtful critique than thought-policing. These exhibitions bring out the worst instincts in everyone.)

Right now in New York, there’s the New Museum’s Carsten Höller fun-fair of rides, slides, and flotation tank, most of it restagings of past amusements. The show packs the house; viewers feel pleased with themselves for “getting it”; nothing provides much in terms of form, social commentary, or the willful transformation of materials. It’s arty junk food. Last summer saw Allora & Calzadilla’s unctuous Venice Biennale spectacle, which included U.S. Olympic gymnasts performing atop wooden models of airline seats and a model of Freedom (the statue atop the U.S. Capitol’s dome) resting on a tanning bed. It would be impossible to imagine anyone getting anything from these works, except briefly distracted. Back at MoMA, Carlito Carvalhosa’s fossilized-on-arrival atrium installation included sound, hanging microphones, and a meaningless labyrinth of material hung from the ceiling. Viewers walked through this thing as numb as cows in a Temple Grandin chute, led into psychic oblivion. (MoMA is also now showing the defining work of Relational Aesthetics, a re-creation of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 1992 feeding-the-audience piece, though I love this work and don’t begrudge its return. Unlike the others, it still ignites the mind, the space, and seemingly all who partake and interact there.)

Some observers respond that blockbuster shows are all broadly appealing: “Monet and Cézanne are as easy to like as Allora & Calzadilla.” I’d respond that Monet and Cézanne are not at all easy to like, and that they complicate your life, in the best way. Allora & Calzadilla, et al., go down smooth and just make your life simpler, in the worst way. It’s a vacuous vicious circle, ostensible populism masquerading as collectivity. All of it says that too many museums now equate happy crowds with quality and experimentation. These shows serve the museums, curators, and trustees. They no longer serve art. In fact, this sensationalism implies that many museums have now fallen behind art.

To artistic, when should art ever be consider the needs of the viewer? If we did that all museums would be malls showing Thomas Kinkaid.

http://nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2011/museums-as-playgrounds/

Just sad: Historic UK Tube Station Bans DSLRs But Not Other Cameras

alistairhenning — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:26:14 +0000

Re-posted from TechCrunch

Here’s an odd little quirk of the modern age you’re not likely to see again soon. South of Holborn in London (many nice bookstores in the area), there’s a tube station that has been out of use for decades. Aldwych (previously Strand) station has been preserved as an historical landmark and used in a number of films and shows. Just recently it was opened up to the public for tours: £20 for entry, doubtless an interesting spectacle popular among both tourists and locals.

And just outside, a sign reading: “Due to their combination of high-quality sensor and high resolution, digital SLR cameras are unfortunately not permitted inside the station.” How delightfully absurd!

Now, naturally there must be some restrictions on recording equipment. You mustn’t use flash photography on the Mona Lisa, and professional videographers and photographers apply for licenses for off-hours shoots and so on. So it’s not like you can bring your tripod, flash umbrella, models and stylists to do an impromptu shoot wherever you like. But really, now. A wholesale ban on an extremely popular device very likely to be possessed by the people coming to this location?

And of course the DSLR format is by no means a guarantee of quality pictures, if preventing quality is the aim of this policy. A mobile phone will take better pictures than DSLRs from a few years back if used properly. And compact high-quality cameras are gaining ground as well: would the security guards confiscate an X100 or Olympus PEN camera?

In the case of a museum or tour, in which the property is in fact private and you are paying for admission, you must agree to their silly rules, though I expect such rules will soon be dropped as they are recognized as pointless and ineffective. But this kind of ignorant restriction is of a piece with the more disturbing ones we see placed on public photography, in which entire buildings are supposedly immune to picture-taking from the street. The rules are imaginary, of course, or at best arbitrary, as shown here. It’s not even worth arguing about how you might circumvent it.

This sign is something you can just shake your head at and buy a postcard to make up for a lack of photos, but the mindset behind it — aggressive ignorance — is dangerous.

LIFE was born 75 years ago today (photo retrospective)

alistairhenning — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:58:33 +0000

‘Dali Atomicus’ by Philippe Halsman 1948

November 23 1936 was the start of LIFE. No longer available in the printed form the magical LIFE.com lives on and is a treasure trove of imagery. To comemorate the anniversary LIFE.com DOP Simon Barnett has put together his edit of the 75 best photo’s from the past 75 years here

Occupy Art: Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Christina’ gets pepper-sprayed

alistairhenning — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 05:58:49 +0000

Re-posted from Dangerous Minds

“Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth.

Lieutenant John Pike strolling through the art world with his little red can of pepper-spray. From tough guy to Internet LOL meme in 48 hours.

Pike will have plenty of time to sharpen his aim now that he’s been put on indefinite leave.

“Picnic In The Park” by Édouard Manet

“A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat.

Thanks to Mark Yarm

Camera Holding Instructions

alistairhenning — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:49:53 +0000

Via YIMMY’S YAYO™

“Jamie Stewart: The Perils of Touring” great summary of why I don’t tour anymore

alistairhenning — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 21:10:06 +0000

Re-posted from 'Culture' on HuffingtonPost.com

For the past nine years I have been playing in a band called Xiu Xiu. For seven of those years, it is how I've eked out a living. In all of music, the most boring and terrifying thing to whine about is how Apple destroyed the business and how musicians cannot make money selling records anymore. With the relatively high number of bi people who find refuge and meaning as working musicians, this is a double "fuck you" to us, professionally and personally. However dull this is, it is more or less true.

We used to tour for about three months a year, and then I would get a check for the last record we'd recorded. The check was usually for about what I would make in two and half months of touring. After a while this allowed me to move out of a punk-rock shanty and into a one-bedroom apartment that cost $750 a month. I could buy $11 Chianti, soap that smelled like lavender and be home nine months a year, working on writing songs and seeing my sister. Basically, by the grace of God, I began to live a normal, queer-o, working-class level of existence.

So back to our stale, long, "people stopped buying records" story — meow moo meow, moo meow moo. Because of this, I now have to be on tour for about six and half months a year to keep living like a Western, adult human with a shred of dignity (i.e., not in total squalor in a house that has a basement that regularly floods with feces a foot and half deep… true story).

But when I say I have to tour for six-plus months a year, I do not mean to suggest that I also do not feel like I get to tour that much. The actual playing shows part of this is still remarkable, and we have been all over Europe, Asia and North America.

But aside from graciously developing a continental palate, another byproduct of royalties going away and therefore needing to tour so much more is that you are in a club every night where there are hundreds of drunk strangers, in a city every day where you do not fit, and far, far, far, far away from home for half your life. Most of the time this is exciting and fine, but on about every trip or so, something dangerous happens that would never occur if I were safe in the confines of my little nest.

Sometimes these situations are self-imposed, due to losing it from the grind of that much weird travel, and sometimes these situations would only and could only happen to a touring musician.

The very first time something rotten happened, we were at a small club in Houston. We were playing our little, mopey songs to about seven patrons when a guy jumped on the stage and punched our former keyboard player in the chest. She crashed to the ground, and the guy ran out the door. The bouncer only laughed. To our former keyboard player's massive credit, she got back up onto her chair and finished the show, a true badass. Now she writes greeting cards. I promise you no one at her current job punches her in the chest while she is at her desk.

In Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Seattle I have had bottles, ice cubes and quarters thrown at my face while playing, all by the same traveling boy/girl couple whom I had had sex with in Los Angeles the weekend before. In what other job would there be a situation in which this baffling gesture could take place?

In Austin, a guy threw lit cigarettes at me and yelled "faggot" over and over while I was trying to play. At another show there, while getting paid, one of the white people working in the office used the word "nigger" (and I don't mean "nigga") about three times while he was talking to me about the people at the show. Then one of the bartenders threatened to beat up one of my bandmates, claiming we had used too many drink tickets (which they gave us in the first place). Steers and queers!

In Iowa City, we were loading out our gear after the show, and these two frat dudes walked by and started calling one of my bandmates a "gook" (she is Asian) and our tour manager a "beaner" (she is Latina). My bandmate Angela takes no shit from anyone, so she started screaming at them. Fearing that she was going to get her ass kicked by two drunk frat boys, I grabbed a bottle to swing at them and started yelling, too, while the tour manager led Angela into the van. This worked for a second and the frat boys backed off, but then they and I realized that there were two of them and only one of me, so I, too, jumped in the van to get away. They started kicking the van doors. However, we were across the street from a police station, and some cops came out and tackled them as they tried to run away. They had to call their daddies to bail them out. Ha ha ha!

In Budapest, we were playing a show on a boat. After we played, there was this big, fake, heavy metal yuppie party featuring the exotic dancer champion of Europe. She happened to be Hungarian, so it was a big deal. We were hanging out at the bar with some friends who run the club and were asked if we wanted to see the dancer's show. By this point, we had already gotten naked and posed for photos on all the Harley motorcycles outside the club, so why not go see the champ?

A photographer who was on tour with us started taking photos of the champ while she was dancing in this huge prop champaign glass. After about a minute, these gigantic, coked-out guys in leather jackets with, according to my friend, incredibly soft hands, wrestled him to the ground and tried to smash his camera. Somehow he tossed it to me without them seeing, and I stuffed it in my pants to hide it. They got so angry that they couldn't find the camera that they started shaking him violently and screaming, "Kill you! Kill you!"

The promoters we had been drinking with rushed over to save him, and it looked like all of us were going to have a massive brawl, but they let my wayward photographer friend go, and we ran away. It turned out that the guys who grabbed my friend did not even work there but were just some fucking fans who did not want anyone taking photos of their exotic champion.

In St. Gallen, Switzerland, a group of people we were on tour with had an afternoon free, so we went into a sex shop to look around. This was one of the non-female-friendly ones: overly stocked, with unpainted pegboard displays, no music on and a gross staircase going up behind the counter, lined with exaggeratedly high high-heeled shoes.

As soon as we entered, the owner started shouting, "No! No!" at Nika (from Zola Jesus) for holding a coffee. Everyone had coffee, but she is about five feet tall and rail thin, with long, blonde hair. She is not a diminutive person in character, but if you just saw her and were the presupposing type, that is what you would assume. She shouted back, "OK! OK!" and put her cup outside. Odd? Yes, but we kept looking around. After about five minutes the owner turned on a live David Bowie bootleg video and slowly started making it louder and louder until it became incredibly booming throughout the store. Our Bowie-maniac tour manager Jakub walked over and asked the owner what show it was from. The owner turned around and cranked it even louder, which did not seem possible.

He was being so bizarre and rude that we decided that we had to keep looking around, of course. I found some zines of cross-dressing merged with infantilism porn. I am a big bi pervert, but I had never seen anything like this — certainly one or the other, but never both at the same time. Nika and I love this part of life, so I called her over to show her. After about 30 seconds of looking at it, the owner ran past me to Nika and literally pushed her out of the way. He grabbed the zines and shouted, "Go, go, go!"

This was too much, so we all filed out, knocking a couple of dildos onto the floor for good measure for his having shoved our friend. I stood in the doorway and farted really loudly to say, "Goodbye!"

We were walking down the street talking about how strange it all was when out of nowhere, the owner ran past all of us and up to Nika. He sprayed a yellow aerosol can at her face! We were stunned, didn't move for one second and then realized what had been going on: this fucking guy had some kind of dark, violent power-fetish when it comes to small, blonde women and was getting off on this.

Jakub and I chased him down the street screaming bloody murder, trying to kick and spit on him. The guy ran into a falafel place and stood behind the owner, saying he was going to call the police and feinted spraying at us again. We said, "Go ahead, call the police, as he has just assaulted our friend."

In a rush of adrenalin, I was able to grab the spray can from the crazy porn shop guy's hand and saw that it was bug spray! He had sprayed bug spray in Nika's hair and face.

A crowd gathered, and I guess it looked to them like we were trying to beat this guy up for no reason. They started yelling at us. There was one dad there with his 6-year-old son, both with bowl cuts. I told him to get his kid out of there. He said, "Violence never solves anything." He was right, and it occurred to us that no matter what happened, if the cops the came, it was going to take like nine hours to deal with this bullshit, or we were going to jail. We had a show to get to that night. We left, screaming obscenities, and jotted down the name of the sex shop so that we could look it up and crank call him for the rest of his life.

However, the worst case of all was at our own hands. Reasonably, this isn't exactly right for publishing on HuffPost, but you can find an unedited version at xiuxiu.org. I will say it took us about two hours to clean up the room the next morning. I never do this kind of thing at home.

A hundred more affairs like this and worse have happened to us and are happening to a touring musician somewhere on Earth right this second. There are few fields where a bi person can be as supported for who they are as music. Really, I can't think of any aside from sex work. Circus ring leader, maybe? Music is good for you. Touring is bad for you. When the place where one can truly be oneself and lean on as the reason for living is so fraught with industrialized, greedy, pummeling and uncertain, nut-balled hazard, what should be the most awesome bi-life ever is, at a confusing rate, reduced to just sort of awesome.

Really? $4.3 Million for That Photo?

alistairhenning — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 21:09:29 +0000

By Jakob Schiller

November 11, 2011 | Re-Printed from here.

Photo: Andreas Gursky/CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2011

This week, auction house Christie’s sold the above photo by Andreas Gursky for $4.3 million, setting the record for all-time most expensive photo (the previous record was set by Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled #96,” which sold for $3.89 million).

For many starving photographers in the 99%, this may be similar to seeing heads of the big banks getting giant bonuses while the rest of the economy suffers. But from Van Gough to Pollock, the “value” of art has always been in the eye of the beholder.

Those unfamiliar with Gursky may be wondering: What’s so special about a picture of a river and some grass? What elevates that photo above so many others? And how did the price get so astronomically high?

Well, for one thing, it’s not uncommon for a Gursky to sell for millions of dollars. His piece 99 Cnet II Diptychon at right also broke records when it was auctioned off for $3.3 million. Also, Gursky is akin to a painter in the way he creates surreal scenes through stitching, and digital manipulation and only makes very limited prints of each work. People are usually less surprised by these types of prices for works by en vogue painters.

Francis Outred, Head of Christie’s Post War and Contemporary Art Department in Europe, says that size and technique also factored in. “Working on an unprecedented scale with outstanding printing techniques and color and grain definition to challenge painting, he has led a group of artists who have re-defined the medium in culture today,” he says.

Another factor appears to be the piece’s rarity. “Of the edition of six, three are in public museums (Moma, Tate, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich), one is with a private museum (Glenstone, Potomac) and only two are left in private collections, of which this is one. In other words this is almost as rare as a one-off painting,” says Outred.

A gallery professional, who asked not to be named for concern over adverse professional repercussions, thinks the price is a bit of a farce. He says he’s noticed a growing trend where photographers are working hard to re-brand themselves as “artists” so they can sell their pieces in the higher-priced fine art markets that don’t traditionally trade in photography. This sale, he said, smacks of that change.

While he tries to take a balanced approach and realize that any sale of this kind has the potential to reflect positively on the medium of photography, he also said it’s important to call a spade a spade and avoid turning photography into something it’s not.

David Bowie: ‘Heroes’ photo session outtakes

alistairhenning — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:02:22 +0000

How to be a Retronaut has posted some amazing outtakes from the photo session that yielded the ‘Heroes’ album cover, one of my all-time favorites. Shot by Japanese photographer and designer Masayoshi Sukita in 1977.