notes on becoming fearless

art PAUSED - one minute sculptures

Austrian artist and sculptor Erwin Wurm photographed Claudia Schiffer for the November issue of German Vogue in a series of his famous one minute sculptures where the person temporarily becomes the sculpture - often interposed with everyday objects.       

Whilst I am not that keen on Wurm's other works I do like the idea of these fleeting human sculptures.  They make for quietly interesting images.

 

ISSEY miyake

Issey Miyake's first show in New York at FIT in 1975...

ENCENS

I think I need to start buying Encens magazine... The archives on their website are full of beautiful and inspiring images.  Now I just want to go and cocoon myself in cloth and hope that I may by some strange fate end up looking this glamorous.

 

 

 

 

 
 

line pattern REPETITION symmetry

Some photos...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

feathers

Get them now before they sell out...

 

Available in black, grey and cream.  If only I had some spare cash!

dining il FUTURISMO

For Lewis's birthday I decided to throw him a Futurist dinner party.  The Futurist theme suits him perfectly because he loves not only food but also bizarre and inedible food and is constantly thinking up ideas for strange and fantastical restaurants.  Also like Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist movement, he despises pasta.  And he likes shouting at people, particularly about his opinions on art.

Cues for courses and cocktails came from Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook and the Manifesto taking in their preferred subjects of speed, industrialisation, technology, youth, violence and the technological triumph of humanity over nature.  The Futurists, who I have posted about briefly before, believed that eating should be a sensory experience in all respects and should overthrow the expected so we started by providing all the diners with bibs made of various materials from PVC to lace to tweed.  Throughout the meal diners were instructed to engage in tactile pleasures and feast their fingers on their neighbour's bib.

The programme is too long and complicated to reproduce here in it's entirety so here are some snippets from the meal... pills filled with Grappa and Campari, cheese and wine cocktails, Manifesto stuffed oranges, magic food with surprise fillings, timed interludes of silence, darkness and aeroplane noise and eating rounds accompanied by generally unsettling music.  Cocktails of pure alcohol topped with anchovies and chilli, a tactile vegetable garden, raw beef marinated in a sauce of cognac and rum torn by the blasts of an electric kazoo, eating without cutlery and without the use of hands, jellies and blancmanges topped with aeropoetic shapes, cocktail jelly bombes and a robotic cake, and a towering meat sculpture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to Jennie for helping me to organise and acting as a waiter with me, Fran for creating the meat sculpture, Cat for the robot cake.

Photos taken by James and Cat.

NEW YORK new york

I recently spent a fantastic week exploring New York for the first time.  So very expensive but so very worth it.  Here are a few of my photos...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And if you're ever in Williamsburg you should go for a cocktail at the beautiful Hotel Delmano and eat at the Brooklyn Star. Somehow all the food and drink options in East London seem rather lacking now... there were more restaurants and bars than we could feasibly fit into just one week but unfortunately I think it might take me a while to save up enough cash for another trip!

HARDCORE dancefloor

Artist Mark Leckey's film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore remains, as one commentator put it, one of the best things ever seen in a gallery.  This found footage from clubs and raves is edited together into a video essay which charts the rise and fall of trends in dance music and youth culture from the 70s through to the 90s.   

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey) from Anon. on Vimeo.

Mark Leckey will be performing his lecture In The Long Tail as part of MoMA's Performance Exhibition Series at the Abron Arts Center in New York on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of October.  Details here.

thai STYLE

Some photos from my holiday to Thailand earlier this year.

FUN and games

Patriot Games editorial from the August edition of US Elle.  Nice shapes...