in such a world art | veg | academia | geekery

Marilyn Minter’s painting and photography

Marilyn Minter’s photography (and painting) is up close, in-your-face, visceral, dripping with tangible texture, abject, corporeal, sexual, and stunning.  She also made a video called Green Pink Caviar in the same evocative style. (via)

Chewing Pink
2008

Bazooka
2009

Crystal Swallow
2006
painting, enamel on metal

Joshua Shirky in SFMOMA’s brochure of her work, writes:

In place of these idealized objects, Minter shows us unruly bodies that cannot fit within our culture’s carefully drawn lines: greedy, excessive bodies that ooze and leak and are marked by too much sweat, too much makeup, too much hair, too much grime. (…) These works are about our private ruminations and self-scrutiny; they reveal bodies that, compared to the fantasies that bombard us daily, seem to be in a state of constant eruption. Regardless of our efforts and the products we buy, we can never replicate the ideal’s unblemished surface. Minter points out our ambivalence toward beauty by trying to picture something in between flesh and its imaginary simulacrum. She captures our mind’s-eye view of ourselves, and, in her words, helps us make sense of “how it feels to look.”

How to make a baby (video)

(via Tralalere)

Ant Battle: Thursday, 2pm

Posted in Central Park by artist d.billy. Fantastic!  I absolutely love this kind of playful site-specific public art. (via)

Philippe Ramette, Balcon II

Enjoying this interesting photograph on a grey Tuesday.  Philippe Ramette: “Balcon II,” 2001. (Found here, where you can see it in a larger size)

Dreena Burton joins True/Slant

Dreena Burton, the author of amazing cookbooks Vive Le Vegan, Eat Drink & Be Vegan, and The Everyday Vegan (featuring simple, delish and healthy veg recipes) has joined True/Slant to write more about her family’s food choices.  I really liked her first post, quote:

Yes, unfortunately our family’s plant-based diet is far from the norm. While the vegan diet has had gotten a bad rap for many years, it is important to know how much vegan eating has changed. From fine dining restaurants and cookbooks, to vegan catering and vegan resorts, veganism has blossomed and is far from its “sprouts and steamed tofu” roots.

In my world, vegan food is exciting and diverse, and it’s always a thrill for me to create and share new vegan recipes with family, friends, and my blog and cookbook readers. Who knows, maybe I’m inviting others to explore their own vegan world with a recipe here and there. I think I just may be. At least, I’m going to keep thinking so.

New budget = new print? Whoops.

Despite the fact that J and I have organized a very tight budget in order to start attacking my student debt, I saw the print below and purchased it immediately with my new meager spending allowance.  I love its inherent rhythm, graphic elements of cartography and typography, and humour. $18, 11 x 17 silkscreen print at OrkPosters. (via Bioephemera)

Clickable: You Are Addicted

YOU ARE ADDICTED AND YOU KNOW IT. What addiction comes to mind for you before you click True or Untrue?  New media art for the win.

Photography of built space by Christoph Morlinghaus

Christoph Morlinghaus takes amazing architectural photographs, including startlingly modern and innovative churches. I stared in amazement and had a few double takes before I realized that these churches ACTUALLY EXIST.

I agree with Gary of Junk for Code, who observes:

It’s odd–this work explores the use of space as constructed locations, as means of spiritual experience. But the spiritual experience requires people and, as there are no people, so the built form is the spiritual experience–the forms’ graceful interplay of light and concrete effortlessly transposes light into sweeping realms of infinite space.

In an interview when asked about his photographic technique, Morlinghaus admits:

I don’t use any other technique other than “straight photography”. I only use an 8×10 camera and color negative film (recently I switched to a 12×20 camera and black and white). I never use any other light except for the light that is already there. I print, or contact, my own negatives without the use of a computer. (…) I hope that there is a certain amount of truthfulness and honesty in my images that, combined with traditional photography, produces beauty. In addition, I think that the very long exposure times that I use give a feeling of “captured time”.

I highly recommend checking out his extensive online portfolio for more brilliant photography and larger versions. I have selected a few of my favs after the jump.

[Read more →]

I have had this in my head. all. day.

(via)

David Foster Wallace commencement speech

Excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s infamous (and very compelling) commencement speech, on thinking differently:

“Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”