Photographer Nubar Alexanian has worked alongside, behind the scenes and on the sets with filmmaker Errol Morris for 15 years. Alexanian accompanied Morris to the Walker Tuesday to screen and discuss Morris’ new film, Standard Operating Procedure. Here, in the Walker Art Lab, Alexanian discusses Nonfiction, his new photo book drawn from the sets of Morris’ films.
Amsterdam’s Public Space with a Roof has reprinted Off Center’s interview with Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn in its publication BEAUTY UNREALIZED: spider webs of personal universes seeking a form. The book catalogues items from PSWAR’s temporary library, a multimedia installation comprised of objects that were personally or professionally inspiring to 94 people from various backgrounds. It’s part of PSWAR’s research on “understanding beauty not in terms of an object’s internal quality but in terms of its effect on the beholder.”
Here’s the original Hirschhorn interview, conducted in October 2006 inside his Cavemanman, a cave in the Walker galleries constructed from cardboard, packing tape, aluminum foil, and other materials.
(Thanks, Pam.)
Like the name might imply Zine Machine is a vending machine selling zines, books and minicomics with prices from $1 to $10. It’s located in the University of Iowa’s Library, but you might spot them at a zine workshop or conference near you. The machine has an open submission policy that could get your zines distributed right in the heart of the USA.
The project began as Book Drop, a book vending machine showing the value of hand binding by selling individual kits of book parts. It picked up it’s more contemporary mission earlier this year.
The vending theme similar to the Art-o-Mat project, but focussed more specifically on DIY literature.
From the meat dress mentioned here to the sock monkey dress here, I’m going to keep the craft theme alive with a look at the new book By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art. In the catalogue for the UK Crafts Council’s 2004 exhibition Boys Who Sew, curator Janice Jeffries defines the term ” to craft”:
As a verb, though, “to craft” seemingly means to participate in some small-scale process. This implies several things. First, it affirms the results of involved work. This is not some kind of detached activity… To craft is to care… [It] implies working on a personal scale–acting locally in reaction to anonymous, globalized, industrial production…
Artists that come to mind immediately are Robert Gober, who hand-makes replicas of everything from a kitchen sink to tissue boxes, and Kiki Smith, who’s featured in By Hand. That book, inspired in party by Jeffries’ definition, features innovative and unexpected uses of craft in contemporary art, accompanied by first-person statements by each artist. One such artist is Rob Conger whose art–latch-hook rugs like the ones he made as a youth–focuses frequently on the mediated dreams of money: he’s done yarn homages to lottery lines, The Price is Right, and Alan Greenspan, to name a few. (”We confuse our desire for beauty with our desire for money,” he writes.)
Rob Conger’s The Big Wheel, woven acrylic thread on quarter-inch mesh, 1999
Rob Conger, Powerball Line, woven acrylic yarn on quarter-inch canvas mesh, 1998
Not unlike Kara Walker’s transformation of the stately craft of black-paper silhouettes into shocking exposes on race and gender, Kent Hendricksen takes found tapestries and embroiders in ropes and hoods “turning light-hearted
innocence into dark vignettes of sadism and emotional aggression.”
Kent Henricksen, Lady Lovers (The Secret), embroidery thread on woven fabric mounted on wood, 2004
Robyn Love, whose guerrilla knitting projects have included a gravestone cozy, created a Memorials project, in which she knit what she felt were missing elements of objects and structures like a bus shelter and World War I statue. “My cozies were intended to obscure the thing that was already obscuring the original person or event.”
Memorial: The Doughboy (installed in Doughboy Plaza, Woodside, NY), knit wool, 1999
Mahfouz Naguib, the only Arabic-language writer to win a Nobel Prize and Egypt’s most famous author, died this morning in Cairo at age 94. Best known for his Cairo Trilogy, he was a controversial figure who repeatedly rankled conservatives. His book Children of Gabalawi was banned by Islamic authories in 1959 for including characters who represented God and the prophets, and in 1994, he was stabbed by a militant angered about such portrayals. Of the latter, he said, “They are trying to extinguish the light of reason and thought. Beware.”
Writes Issandr El Amrani:
Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian archetype - a pragmatic, down-to-earth, somewhat fatalistic, stubborn man who liked to keep his head down and observe the world around him with humour and irony. “Life is wise to deceive us,” he once wrote, “for had it told us from the start what it had in store for us, we would refuse to be born.“
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