Greed

Rabbit
by Run Wrake
For more ingenious weirdness, check out the Run Wrake website.  Film recommendation from Molly Schafer via Christopher Reiger.

I feel a certain kinship...

... and some day we're both going to chew somebody's face off.

Bring it.

This man is here for the party.  Let him be an example to you.

Have you started getting together your costume yet?

Image from BibiOdyssey

To want so many things and still want nothing.

How To Like It
by Stephen Dobyns

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept-
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

Poem via Smith College Poetry Center. Drawing by Georges Seurat via One Piece in reference to this fabulous show at the MoMA.

Clockwork

We move like cold machines—
Clicking locks and doors,
Each somehow missing
The other's gaze —not unfriendly,
But accustomed to the movement.

Image pulled from Shorpy.  Poem  by me.

Only in Ikea...

These covers are from the instruction booklets of real Ikea products.



I have a copy of this booklet. It is some lonely designer's haiku to the emptiness of consumer culture.



While looking for the Lack instructions I found this guy. He was with a group of other Jerkers, but I chose him to represent his kind.

After parting ways with the Jerkers, I ran into these fellows. Very polite and sociable in a Scandinavian sort of way.







But seriously folks...

This is from the video Stealing Beauty by Guy Ben-Nar. I love it. You can read about it here if you are fluent in German.



Ikea images yoinked from IKEAFANS. Video via Especially Messily (I think...)

Case and Point.

A few posts ago I stuck up for the young, Halo-enthused master of tape and cardboard. While reading magazines at Barnes & Noble (really, who buys them?) I checked out the latest edition of Hi-Fructose and saw this guy.



Mike Rea makes guns and machines out of wood, in addition to creating scenes that spoof both high art and popular cinema. His craftsmanship looks impeccable, and I'm down with his whole ooovra (that's french for artwork).

But look at these two videos, and tell me I'm wrong. If somebody would just teach the Halo Kid about irony he could hurry up and be an art star.





On second thought, if we leave him alone he'll be an engineer, which is far more profitable.

Image ripped from Mike Rea's Site

Milk and Hammers

Hammers

Chris Milk Hulburt

(2005)

So you want to be a carpenter, do you?
Well it takes more than a hammer, boy, you're gonna need blueprints and a will to build, and...
Straighten your cap! you look like you've been through a war.
Wipe that grin off your mug, you got a sturdy frame?
Sluggish posture just won't cut it.
You're gonna need schooling, and, and, and take notes!
And god if I catch you yawning again you're gonna regret ever asking for my help.

From How to Be a Carpenter by Aesop Rock


Last year I had pleasure of helping with the installation of Nooks: If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now. The project was the work of the Canadian art collective Instant Coffee and was sponsored by the Henry Art Gallery. I had a great time working with the folks from Instant Coffee and found them to be fun, interesting people.

Nooks installed at Bumbershoot 2007

During the installation, I glimpsed a piece of paper bearing the slogan "It doesn't have to be good to be meaningful." The phrase caught my eye and stuck in my mind. Throughout the day I turned the phase over in my head as I drove nails with a pneumatic gun. I found the words to be tantalizing, but, try as I might, I couldn't quite swallow the message.

At first glance, the slogan rings entirely true. Meaning is independent of quality. The deepest realizations can be catalyzed by flawed creations or acts of chance-- a scrap of paper, a snippet of conversation, a half-obscured billboard turned suddenly poignant.

Why then should the artist devote great effort to sharpening his skills or polishing his technique? Why not race wholeheartedly after pure meaning? Why not forsake guile and pretense and simply speak from the heart?

Garden

Chris Milk Hulburt

2004-2005

This notion is a driving force behind the Outsider Art movement. A fusion of overlapping and ill-defined movements (Naive Art, Art Brut, Folk Art, Visionary Art, etc), this broad movement aims to sidestep the pitfalls of pretense and head straight down the path of earnest expression. Much of this art is deeply moving, stemming solely from the artists' need to create and communicate. Compared to the haughty intellectualism of Academic Art and the ironic sophistication of Gallery Art, Outsider Art seems honest and heartfelt. In fact, Outsider Art is big business these days, and many mainstream galleries exhibit the work of artists that could be considered Outsiders.

As an example, consider the paintings of Chris Milk Hulburt. Self-taught and entrepreneurial, Hulburt occupies the gray zone between Outsider and Fine Art. His pictures are at once hip, witty, and heartfelt. They are the product of his own idiosyncratic striving, but strike a resounding chord with many discerning viewers.

The overall impression of Hulburt's work is one of playful, sincere simplicity. Yet closer examination reveals a layer of skilled complexity that is not immediately apparent. This is especially true in person, where layers of paint and color interact in surprising and dynamic ways. The artist has taken great care to craft each work to suit his purpose. Beneath the simple exterior lies a sound structure built with painstaking skill-- skill in service to honest vision.

It is in this underlying structure that I find the flaw within the Instant Coffee slogan. No, art does not need to be good to be meaningful. Yet if the artist has a meaning that he wishes to convey, he must be good. He must be good so that he may deliver the chosen meaning intact and undistorted. This requires struggle, practice, and forethought.

I found a perfect example of this point in the Instant Coffee exhibit itself. As the nooks were being constructed, volunteers stapled handmade posters to the surrounding wall. Midway into the process, a tiny crisis erupted. The makers of the posters had not considered the typography of the words, so the words were not behaving as expected.



Oops.

The glitch was pretty minor, and the show went on, but without proper execution the intended meaning was lost.*

In fact, Nooks succeeded precisely because it was good. Apart from the aforementioned glitch, it was well made and well thought out. On that hot afternoon in '07, Instant Coffee created a cool, cozy refuge for sun-stricken festival-goers. I was one of them, and and I was deeply thankful for the respite.

Between the process of construction and the experience of the final product, I enjoyed myself and learned quite a bit. I suppose that I could say that my experience with Instant Coffee was a meaningful one. Interestingly, this is where projects like Nooks do their conceptual jujitsu. The meaning of the piece is to create an environment wherein the viewer can create his own meaning. It is an artistic goal that I find simultaneously kind in its nurturing neutrality, and sheisty in its evasion of the central struggle of art.

As for the slogan? I can take it or leave it, but if it goads one person over their fears and helps them make art then I'm all for it-- even if that art is terrible.

After all, it doesn't have to be good to be meaningful.

Right?



* I witnessed some of the poster-hangers trying to palm the unintended result off as simply a new element of the installation with its own novel meaning. To this, I say Bah. The resulting statement "You wish here were" has its own garbled meaning, which can be made to be profound with some thought. This is unsurprising. The Dada-esque construction of random phrases creates meaning entirely through chance, and our logic-hungry brains struggle mightily to pull meaning out of anything and everything. When done on purpose, chance-based methodologies are a valid part of contemporary art. When done by mistake because of an oversight... well, where I come from we call that a f***-up.


Images are ripped from the Instant Coffee site and Chris Milk Hulburt's site (apologies for the previuos confusion). Check out his upcoming show at Ghostprint Gallery. I snapped the image of the posters with my little cell phone camera during construction.

The Geography of Nowhere

“We created a landscape of scary places, and we became a nation of scary people.”



“The problem with our common American daily environments is not that they are too uniform, but that they are of uniformly miserable quality.”



“It is hard to imagine a culture less concerned than ours with the things that make life worth living.”



Words by James Howard Kunstler via Project for Public Spaces. I believe most of them are from the book The Geography of Nowhere, which is the namesake of this post.

Photos © Michael McDevitt 2008

Bumblebees outwit robotic spiders.

Best headline in a while, but...


...Superboy still gets the girl.

Read the real article at the BBC or learn more about Beeboy at Again With The Comics..
You be the Decider.