(Próximamente en la gran Ciudad de México.)
Posted in March 2009 …
ANOTHER REMINDER FROM OLDENBURG
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself…
I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man’s metal stick.
I am for the art that grows in a pot, that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, that hides in the clouds. I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch.I am for art that unfolds like a map, that you can squeeze, like your sweety’s arm, or kiss, like a pet dog. Which expands and squeaks, like an accordion, which you can spill your dinner on, like an old tablecloth.
–Claes Oldenburg, I Am for an Art
(From Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, an anthology of essays, interviews, ideas and manifestos written by artists working from the 1940′s through today.)
CHRISTOPHER DOYLE EN TÓXICO!
[nggallery id=44]
(Yes yes yes: the marvelous Christopher Doyle is our next Tóxico International Guest.)
—
Asà es. Un nuevo Tóxico Master-Class impartido por el incomparable y legendario maestro del baile cinematográfico, Christopher Doyle; director de fotografÃa de Wong Kar-Wai, Jim Jarmush, Gus Van Sant, Zhiang Yimo…
4 y 5 de abril ‘09
Cuidad de México
Tóxico Master-Class
Puedes encontrar más información en www.toxicocultura.com/doyle
Si te interesa te recomendamos que escribas rápido ya que el cupo es (muy) limitado; como Doyle sólo está durante estos dÃas en el DF esta vez no habrá conferencia pública.
Cuota de recuperación: $1,250 pesitos
DOYLE EN LA BBC
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuWZI0yUUHU[/youtube]
(Como probadita de lo que le espera a Tóxico este sábado 4 y domingo 5 de abril)
TARYN SIMON: AN AMERICAN INDEX OF THE HIDDEN AND UNFAMILIAR
| Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility Cherenkov Radiation Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy Southeastern Washington State |
||
| Submerged in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel nuclear-waste capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they contain over 120 million curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one roof in the United States. The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. The temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit. The pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds. Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States. |
| White Tiger (Kenny), Selective Inbreeding Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge and Foundation Eureka Springs, Arkansas |
||||||
| In the United States, all living white tigers are the result of selective inbreeding to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose. Kenny was born to a breeder in Bentonville, Arkansas on February 3, 1999. As a result of inbreeding, Kenny is mentally retarded and has significant physical limitations. Due to his deep-set nose, he has difficulty breathing and closing his jaw, his teeth are severely malformed and he limps from abnormal bone structure in his forearms. The three other tigers in Kenny’s litter are not considered to be quality white tigers as they are yellow coated, cross-eyed, and knock-kneed.
|
| Research Marijuana Crop Grow Room National Center for Natural Products Research Oxford, Mississippi |
| The National Center for Natural Products Research (NCNPR) is the only facility in the United States which is federally licensed to cultivate cannabis for scientific research. In addition to cultivating cannabis, NCNPR is responsible for analyzing seized marijuana for potency trends, herbicide residuals (paraquat) and fingerprint identification. NCNPR is licensed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and also researches and develops chemicals derived from plants, marine organisms, and other natural products.
While 11 states have legalized the medical use of marijuana, a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision allows for the arrest of any individual caught using it for this purpose. Nearly half of the annual arrests for drug violations involve marijuana possession or trafficking.
—
(Taryn Simon is probably one of the most interesting contemporary artists in the world today. Her American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar explores those legal things in the USA that are nonetheless hidden and out-of-view.) — »I am always immensely grateful to people who do impossible things on my behalf and bring back the picture. It means I don’t have to do it, but at least I know what it looks like. So one’s first feeling on looking at many of these extraordinary images is gratitude (followed quickly by a momentary pang of envy: the sedentary writer’s salute to the woman of action).« – Salman Rushdie on Taryn Simon– |
INFOGRAPHIC FAIRY TALE
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/3514904?pg=embed&sec=3514904[/vimeo]
Red Riding Hood, reinterpreted into infographics by Tomas Nilsson. Quite enjoyable. Click play.
OVERHEARD AT TÓXICO: CHRISTOFFER BOE
On the paradox of uniqueness
“if you think about it, being unique should not be that difficult. There are 6 billion people on this planet and yet we all look different. But we usually still try to be or seem like everybody else. It is the same with film. And there is always a battle between the collectiveness of language and a personal point of view. On one hand, I want it so that my film could have not been done by anybody but Herr Boe & Co. On the other hand, I need a context that can make it live outside just my own worldview. The question is always how to make a personal language collective, or how to make this collective language personalized. It has to be unique but it also has to make sense. You want to find a private language but let people know enough of this language to extract meaning from it.”
(Christoffer Boe–acclaimed Danish film director–gave a fabulous Tóxico Workshop in February 2008.)
DAVID LYNCH FOUNDATION TELEVISION
DLF.tv is a celebration of consciousness, creativity and bliss.
It looks like Mr. Lynch had enough of his weather reports and started a whole television network. Visit DLF.tv for Lynch wisdom and meditation techniques, plus interviews with many artists, live concerts and much more.
INTERVIEW WITH EDWARD HOPPER (1959)
JOHN MORSE: Mr. Hopper, I’d like to ask you about one particular picture that made a great impression on me when I first saw it at the Whitney exhibition, and still does, although now it’s in the Duncan Phillips Collection in Washington. That’s Approaching a City, and I’m quite sure, or how I could put it into words, the particular appeal of this picture – maybe it’s impossible – but I would like to hear what you have to say about it.
EDWARD HOPPER: Well, I’ve always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can’t exactly describe the sensations, but they’re entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics. There is a certain fear and anxiety and a great visual interest in the things that one sees coming into a great city. I think that’s about all I can say about it.
JOHN MORSE: Well, in painting this picture were you aware of these wonderful solid geometric forms that took my eye at once?
EDWARD HOPPER: Well, I suppose I was. I tried for those things more or less unintentionally.
JOHN MORSE: Would you go so far as to say it’s almost a subconscious result, effect?
EDWARD HOPPER: Yes, I think so.
JOHN MORSE: But what was in your mind when you were painting it, I gather then, was this feeling of approaching a city?
EDWARD HOPPER: Yes.
American Suburb X posted an interview with painter Edward Hopper from 1959. Read the rest here.
MARCEL BROODTHAERS – A VOYAGE ON THE NORTH SEA
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–uI9ccaLvA[/youtube]
DERRUMBES
De la serie Retratos Ocultos, de Lorena Moreno.
(Lorena tomó el Tóxico Workshop de Colors y Fabrica.)
“Una constante fascinación por sitios abandonados ha sido mi punto de partida para la mayor parte de mi obra, debido a la cantidad de historias que de aquà se puedan generar. Sus lecturas y narrativas a través de los años se han ido desgastando pero, al mismo tiempo, se van produciendo otras en torno a ellos.”
—
(“Somehow I had assumed that the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself, and that what we had once possessed remained our possession forever, and that at least the past, our past, our childhood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve, did not deteriorate like the untended house of an aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in our remembrance. I see that this isn’t so, that memory decays like the rest, is unstable in its essence, flits, occludes, is variable, sidesteps, bleeds away, eludes all recovery; worse, is not what it seemed once, alters unfairly, is not the intact garden we remember but, instead, speeds away from us backward terrifically until when we pause to touch that sun-remembered wall the stones are friable, crack and sift down… and we could cry at the fierceness of that velocity if our astonished eyes had time.â€
-Eric Ormsby, Childhood House-)
THE NEW YORK PHOTO FESTIVAL. AND PHOTO AWARDS
![[air-header3.jpg]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_E2iwZHb-3vU/ScGG4i2EYwI/AAAAAAAAEQw/gpkidB5ytzI/s1600/air-header3.jpg)
Chris Boot–founder of Boot LTD and a past Tóxico International Guest–is one of the curators at this year’s 2009 New York Photo Festival.
Also: the NYPH is currently accepting international submissions for their annual Photo Awards. Anyone interested in submitting work has until May 1st to do so.
More info after the break.
Continue reading
ONCE SAID DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
“Really good fiction can have as dark a worldview as it wishes, but is should find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. My central issue remains how to give CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times.”
TÓXICO PROJECT RESEARCH No. 007
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzPEQF4Ys28[/youtube]
“This is Arthur Lippsett‘s bleak avant garde masterpiece that is well known for being a primary inspiration on George Lucas’ THX 1138. But of course, 21-87 is an epic experimental film on it’s own accord.”
(Via Carlos Casas.)
LET IT BE
Imágenes de Guillermo Tragant, quien ahorita tiene una expo en el Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires.
NOLLYWOOD
Tagged Nollywood, Photography, Pieter Hugo
COW BENCH
(By Julia Lohmann)
“We don’t want our food to remind us of the animal it is made of and, at the same time are able to create living materials through advances in bio-technology. The ‘cow-bench’ explores the threshold between animal and material.”
Via Dezeen blog.
KILLED NEGATIVES, AFTER WALKER EVANS
(Images by Lisa Oppenheim)
Says the Exposure blog:
The new issue of Blindspot, co-edited by Taryn Simon, contains some wonderful, conceptually-minded photo projects. Lisa Oppenheim‘s Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans is one such example. In the press release for her 2008 exhibition at Store Gallery in London, it states:
“In ‘Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans’ (2007), Oppenheim uses Walker Evans’ unpublished photographs from 1938 found in the National Library of Congress. Evans was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to document depression era rural America. These negatives are ‘killed’ because they had holes punched through them to prevent publication. Oppenheim printed them and conceptualises the holes as a space of potential contemporary interpretation.”
BOLAÑO: NUEVOS LIBROS ENCONTRADOS ENTRE VIEJOS DIARIOS
(“… esas cosas que se dicen cuando uno está muy borracho y la noche no sólo es extranjera sino grande, muy grande, tan grande que como te descuides un poco te traga, a ti y a todos los que estén a tu lado.”)
—
Dos novelas nuevas de Bolaño fueron encontradas en España, entre diarios y cartas y poemas y todo un torrento de palabras que como bien dicen, puede ser que sea una universidad completa en unas cuantas cajas. Puedes leer un artÃculo corto sobre esto aquÃ, en The Guardian. O un ensayo un poco más largo pero interesante aquÃ, en español.
Y aquà una entrevista que le hizo Bomb Magazine en el 2002.
(Porque como decÃa Bolaño: la palabra “zapatos” jamás levitará.)
(Mmm. Levitar.)
RECOMENDACIONES FESTIVAL RADAR (ROGELIO SOSA)
“Hola!
top three… mmmm….tengo un top four….
Las percusiones de estrasburgo en el espacio escultorico mañana domingo
Beninnk, Ribot, Cohen y Anderson en el Teatro de la Ciudad el miercoles 18
Nurse with wound el viernes 20
Mike Patton el sabado 21
Pero lo demas tambien esta increible…
Beso,
.
r “
(Rogelio Sosa, director de Radar)
—
(Radar, el espacio de exploración sonora del Festival de la Ciudad de México, busca mostrar las propuestas más relevantes en los ámbitos de la improvisación, el arte sonoro y la música experimental.)
(Más info aquÃ.)
DEVELOPING A SIXTH SENSE
Pattie Maes– head of MIT Media Lab’s new Fluid Interfaces, a group that researches the tools people use to work with information and connect with one another–presents a new device that blows the mind and completely changes the way we can relate to the world.
(Dear Señor Blackaller from the MIT Media Lab, if you are reading this, can you tell us if it is as amazing as it sounds?)
SELF-PUBLISHED INTERNATIONAL BOOK COMPETITION
$25,000 dollar prize for best self-published book. International competition. Deadline July 16th.
JOSE LUIS CUEVAS
Two images, as teasers, of a new project by Mexican photographer José Luis Cuevas, whose work we have show quite a few times in the Toxi-blog. What can we say. We are fans. Look at those faces. And more on their way.
—
(José Luis was enrolled in the Tóxico Martin Parr Master-Class.)
BROOKLYN DIARIES No. 6: AMY STEIN
(Images by Amy Stein, from the “Domesticated” series.)
Met with photographer Amy Stein in New York to talk about her future Tóxico Workshop. Yep. We will be flying her down to Mexico City in June, and we are very excited. More news on this soon. Do keep posted. Her plans for the workshop sound incredible.
E. CIORAN
“I am lured by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like a light and impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by both pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies. I am so cheerful and yet so sad that my tears reflect at once both heaven and earth. If only for the joy of my sadness, I wish there were no death on this earth.”
BROOKLYN DIARIES No. 05: CAROLL TAVERAS
Great morning with photographer Caroll Taveras, talking over hot chocolate. Saw her photo studio where she just did a new project, and she also showed me her new collage book called Surrender.
(Read an interview on this last one here, recently published by Wallpaper Magazine.)
BROOKLYN DIARIES No. 04: JOSHUA RAY
Oh. Yes. Flames out of mouths, million tongues at the speed of lightning. Sat down with Joshua Ray during the recent snow storm at a Thai restaurant in Brooklyn, and we talked for more than seven hours straight sitting in the same spot with out noticing how many hours had gone by. As we invariably seem to do when we are once again in the same room; entering left to Thursday City.
(Images by the unmistakable hand of Joshua Ray.)
BROOKLYN DIARIES No. 03: W.G. SEBALD
“For instance, if I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to fin our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive at a certain house at a given time. And might it not be that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?”
-W.G. Sebald-
(From a book I bought a few days ago. Nice to read when returning to a city I once lived in and loved madly; feeling I just might peer out of a window on a second floor to watch myself walking down Eldrige Street.)
(More on Sebald here.)
(On the far side of time, so to speak.)
BROOKLYN DIARIES No. 02: PABLO REINOSO
The Spaghetti Bench, designed by Pablo Reinoso and created by Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
BONUS T.O.W: CLINIC – THE SECOND LINE
Clinic’s show yesterday at El Lunario in Mexico City is one of the best I’ve seen in my life. I know my opinion is largely based on my enormous appreciation for the band and that I’ve been waiting for almost ten years to see them live. But what I can safely say is that Clinic is terribly unappreciated, though they have become more popular overtime, everyone is missing the point: Clinic is making some of the best music of today.
Photo by Carlo Van de Roer
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC DICTIONARY
The photographic dictionary is dedicated to defining words through the literal, figurative, and personal meanings found in each photograph.
BROOKLYN DIARIES No. 01: PATRICK LYN
Images by Patrick Lyn.
Arrived in Brooklyn, slowly making my way back to Mexico City after the Tóxico workshop in Barcelona. On my first day here I bumped into Patrick (that I know from the times when he was still assisting Stefan Ruiz). He showed me his new website, and I must say I was happy to see him doing such great work.
TEST PATTERNS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
[nggallery id=42]
Found on Rocketboom: a nice collection of Vintage TV patterns from around the world.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DR. SEUSS!
Theodore Seuss Geisel. Born a hundred and five years ago in Springfield, Massachusetts. Wrote over 60 children’s books. But was also a political cartoonist after World War II started. Eventually he designed and illustrated posters to support the war effort, and joined the U.S. Army where he was the leader of the animation department. Or as he would have said: “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.â€
FLIGHT PATTERNS IN THE NORTHEAST
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXyo3uLyheQ[/youtube]
This animation displays flight patterns in the Northeast region of the United States. Blue lines turn to white at lower altitudes and show the changing landing patterns of different airports throughout the day.
(via Wired)