piran café

LA-based artist Allison Cortson creates portraits using dust she collects from her subject’s vacuum cleaner bags.

From New American Paintings #79:

For these portraits, I photograph the subjects in their homes. Then over a period of months I collect the dust from their vacuum bags.  .. The paintings are completed by rendering the subjects life-size in a realistic manner in oil; the rest of their environments are created solely out of the dust collected from thier homes. In my experience I have found that every person’s dust is a different shade — subtle, but you can see it reflected in the finished piece.

Cortson’s website is here, and more of these amazing portraits are here.

Screenshot from the artist’s website

Replicas of wooden beehive panels, a unique folk art tradition here, are quite common in Slovenian gift and souvenir shops.

It’s a naive art tradition that dates back to the latter half of the 18th C when apparently bored beekeepers made the switch from one-color designs to painting more vivid scenes and images on their beehive drawers. Most that I’ve seen, originals and souvenir replicas, have religious or historical motifs so I’m not sure where this scene fits in that scheme of things.

I found this one in Svetina, a delightful little village in the hills of eastern Slovenia.  It’s a quiet, tranquil place these days, apparently unlike those heady days of 1887 depicted above. Does anyone have any idea what story this panel is trying to tell?

More about beehive panels in Slovenia here and here, a gallery of panels from the apicultural museum in Radovljica is here, and a few more of my pics from Svetina here.

Svetina 03, originally uploaded by pirano.

I’m not sure if you could find a better setting for collection of these pieces by Costa Rican sculptor Jimenez Deredia. I finally made the time to spend some time at the Colosseum a few weeks ago, and the timing couldn’t have been better.

Above is Recuerdo Profundo, below a closer view. Chocolaty, no?

Deredia a Roma – La Ruta de la Paz opened on June 22, there through November.

From Deredia’s website:

This occasion will also be used to introduce “La Ruta de la Paz”, a project conceived by Jiménez Deredia that includes the realization of nine sculptural complexes which be placed in nine countries of the American continent: a symbolic red thread will be unrevealed from Canada to Tierra del Fuego going through the United States of America, Mexico, Yucatan, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru and Chile representing a link between populations and legends, myths and traditions.

A few more photos are here.

Rome 021, originally uploaded by pirano.

This new underpants museum, which opened its doors last month, will surely be atop this guy’s list of places to visit when his troubles in Germany are behind him.

Via WorldHum:

Belgian artist Jan Bucquoy has just opened the “Musee du Slip” (..) which features framed underwear (..) donated mostly by Belgian artists, singers and politicians, and represents a Utopian longing for an equal society: “If you are scared of someone, just imagine them in their underpants.”

He’s planning to take the exhibit on the road to Paris where he hopes the collection will include items acquired from Carla Bruni among others.

Here’s an interview with Bucquoy, in French, explaining the concept, and a Reuters story where he proclaims, “If I had portrayed Hitler in his underpants there would not have been a war.”

Brussels 05, originally uploaded by pirano.

Some things are more inviting in threes.

This is Steigbild X by Katharina Sieverding from Three: The Triptych in Modern Art, an excellent exhibit I checked out a few months at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. 60 triptychs are featured in the exhibit, including works by Max Beckmann, Francis Bacon, and one of my personal favorites, Otto Dix. Absolutely worth a visit if you’re passing through Stuttgart between now and 14-June. [Getting there]

A few more:

Detail from Argonaulen by Max Beckmann, and

this detail from GrossStadt by Otto Dix.

I snapped 22 pics from the exhibit which are here.

Steigbild X, originally uploaded by pirano.

I just finished reading Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, a fabulous account of a microculture –the high-end modern art world– that 99% of us will never experience.

Those seven days are actually seven chapters, drawn on experiences over five years, a period during which, as Times critic Ben Lewis notes, “art grew from a £2.2 billion industry to a £6.1 billion one, and where prices for some artists’ work increased by factors of between 20 and 80.”

In some respects it’s a breezy travelogue –the book begins with an auction in New York, and spans the globe with stops at the Basel Art Fair, a studio visit to Takashi Murakami in Japan and the Venice Bienale– but also a nicely paced study of the quirky dealers, curators, critics, collectors and hypesters that make up and live in that multi-billion $$ world. Thornton is a trained sociologist but also a journalist, making the quips and quotes culled from hundreds of interviews part reportage and part borderline gossip, and historically relevant as well.

You won’t look at an over-hyped Hirst, or an over-priced piece by a modern artist you’ve never heard off, the same way again.

I rediscovered this book, Revolution and Art (Revolucija in Umetnost), the other day, one I rescued (for 50 cents) from a used bookstore’s outdoor bin on a rainy day a few years back. Between its cloth moisture-warped covers are 40 drawings and paintings depicting life in and around Partisan hospitals in Slovenia during World War II, and was published in 1971 for the 30th anniversary of the Partisan uprising.

Great stuff. Here are a few scans:

Pogorisce Partizanske Bolnice v Savinjski Dolini (Hospital – Scene of Fire), 1945, gouache, Gabrijela Sever

Pendrijevka, Partizanska Bolnica na Gorjancih (Pendrijevka Hospital), not dated, washed China Ink, Vlado Lamut

Ranjeci Lupijo Krompir (Wounded Peeling Potatoes), 1944, pencil, Božidar Jakac

Bolničarka (Hospital-nurse), 1945, lino-cut, Alenka Gerlovič

Ranjenec (Wounded man), 1944, lino-cut, Ive Šubic

Painter Justine Lai is producing a set of oil paintings depicting her having sex with every president of the USA. From her notes:

In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal.

and

I approach the spectacle of sex and politics with a certain playfulness. It would be easy to let the images slide into territory that’s strictly pornographic—the lurid and hardcore, the predictably “controversial.” One could also imagine a series preoccupied with wearing its “Fuck the Man” symbolism on its sleeve. But I wish to move beyond these things and make something playful and tender and maybe a little ambiguous, but exuberantly so. This, I feel, is the most humanizing act I can do.

Slideshow is here. Which presidents can you name?

Via BoingBoing

The bunker, built under the Palazzo degli Uffici which was to serve as the site for the cancelled 1942 World’s Fair, is located in Rome’s EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma) neighborhood.

Via Artdaily:

In the 475 square meters that the underground shelter occupies there now is an exhibition of paintings and installations made by Italian artists Alfredo Rapetti, Fabiana Roscioli and Riccardo dalla Chiesa, which are part of the exhibition titled “Confrontations” organized by the city of Rome and the art gallery Ca D”Oro.

It’s an oppressive space, that contrasts with the pleasures of the arts, with large and narrow halls divided by cement pillars and separated from the exterior by a wall 20 centimeters thick and a vacuum measuring 1.25 meters between the exterior and the bunker.

More on the Galleria Ca’ d’Oro website (in Italian).

HAIP 08 –Hack/Act/Interact/Progress– an open source art festival will celebrate its third edition in Ljubljana from Nov. 3 through 11.

From the organizers:

The festival features individuals and groups with a critical approach towards the technologies that surround us and shape our everyday environment. They generally use open technologies, either as a practical or an ideological choice.

Modern practices of technology and creativity often refer to diverse possibilities and choices at the individual’s disposal – everybody is involved in the social progress and development. And if we take a moment to reflect on what we eat, how we communicate, who dictates how we connect, interact, protest, and participate, we quickly realize that it’s our turn.

What precisely is Hacktopia?

Hacktopia is a plan, a notion of an ideal social order based on open source principles, both in the narrow sense of an open source society, and in the broad sense of a society based on currently unachievable sharing of knowledge. To hacktopically code and create based on copyleft principles therefore means to already create in a space and for a space that does not yet exist. On one hand the term equates the fictional concept with a fair social, legal, and political system, while on the other hand drawing attention to the possibility of an unreal, not-yet-realized, and different society. And finally, it structurally signifies the actual communities that have appeared as a result of the efforts to create an ideally hacked society through open source and copyleft movements. The core question is: hacktopia in the continuum of utopia and dystopia.

Below from the audio-visual performance, A Cable Plays, by Christine Sugrue and Damian Stewart.

[Festival Website][program]

Europeana, the European digital library, museum and archive, will debut on Nov 20 with 2 million digital items.

From Der Speigel:

It’s a rival to the Google Library Project, but also something else — the start of a vast digital backup copy of what’s in Europe’s libraries, museums and national film collections.

and

Not just a page with some facts and figures; the EU has plenty of those. What an EU commissioner has in mind is a rich digital encyclopedia of Europe’s cultural heritage. “Europeana” is an ambitious project to digitize large portions of the continent’s national libraries and put as much of European civilization as possible — books, maps, paintings, photos, films — online for free.

The goal is to expand the collection to 6 million by 2010.

There’s a video tour here.

Opened last Friday, through 11-January-2009.

Via ArtDaily:

Austrian art takes center stage in the second in a series of exhibitions showcasing highlights from the Albertina’s collection of 20,000 international contemporary artworks. 220 works by 33 artists.

Albertina’s website is here, and a list of the artists featured and a few snaps from the exhibit are here. Very nice gallery.

Daily 10 am to 6 pm
Wednesday 10 am to 9 pm
€ 9.50
Albertinaplatz 1
1010 Vienna

Albertina 01, originally uploaded by pirano.

The sign reads Lesbian Square, part of week-long street actions coinciding with this year’s City of Women festival. The actions are organized by The Insurrection of Lesbos, a group founded a year ago after a lesbian couple was thrown out of Ljubljana’s Orto Bar.

The festival concludes today with a wide-ranging offering:

- Karmen Ratković, co-founded the the Zagreb Centre for Women’s Studies and a member of the Zagreb Peace Studies Centre, will address the The Messages of Ecofeminism(s) at the Škuc Gallery at 5 pm;

- Hard to Die, a film chronicling women who have escaped honor killing by Istanbul-based new media artist Selda Asal, and Ashura, a documentary about the evolution of the Shia Islamic ceremony of the same name by Beirut-based Kinda Hassan, will be screened at 7 pm at the Alkatraz Gallery at Metelkova City (both through 30-Oct);

- At 9 p.m. Slovenian dancer Tina Valentan, who divides her time between Maribor and Amsterdam, will premiere When the Moon is Increasing at the Ljubljana Dance Theatre (a second performance is also on tap on Saturday);

- and at 11 pm, a performance by Czech experimental dance-electronic trio My Name is Ann at Metelkova City. Below is their video for Nivel Diez. [MNIA's Myspace page]

Ljubljana 090, originally uploaded by pirano.