you cottage fucks

"...the panoramic perspective is linked to the exercise of political power precisely because of its ability to abstract universal meanings from the specifics of landscape. The panoramic point of view reflects an elevated social position; those with the ability to see the big picture are those who are given the power to control and alter social as well as physical landscapes..."

Michael E. Harkins (2000) Sacred Places, Scarred Spaces p.55

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How do we balance the oncoming collapse and our incessant need to delve into convoluted extractions of visual culture. I'm not going to pretend I don't find anything interesting in the new art criticism and its multifaceted layers of self-gratification and eclecticism, but is it preservable? When a society breaks down and its imperial systems begin to deconstruct, objects become new sources of symbolic stimuli. The imperial (or capitalist) economy changed the classification and context of each and every object in the western world (by way of expropriation and assimilation); the 'art' object has become linked to a kind of status ascendancy. So when such a system breaks down, what do we do with all the abstract expressionists, colour field painters, minimalists, conceptual artists and new postmodernists (the second half of the 20th centuries modern 'progress' builders)? Do we bargain with art museum elitists (Marc Mayer...?) for local produce in lieu of pretentious public access fees? Probably not. May'be we can just look from the outside in like me and my dad used to do at the oversized glass display case that is the Museum of Anthropology.

Dear Derek Carlson: Please start a blog.

well...

it's happening all over again...

Anngjerd Rustand

Erratic

2010

image source: http://anngjerd.no/

Unstable and apprehensive, a suspended vortex.

This is kinda how I feel today.

Pretty insides.

Rebecca Stevenson, Bambarella, 2007

http://www.rebeccastevenson.net


Rebecca Stevenson's polyester resin and wax sculptures are suspended within critical ideas of art, craft, tradition and hybridization. I have an inherent need to make anything and everything about visual identity and I continually manifest intrinsic links to cultural production through these realizations. The use of wax and synthetic materials with the combination of traditional western forms and processes moves Stevenson's work into the realm of post-identity, into a physical hyperreal that proves a tactile existence. This is something craft pushes visual culture to realize, the importance of hybridity, the location of culture swerving in and out of determined boundaries, beyond 'post.' If we are academically situated in that overfed 'postmodern cloud' of intellectual obscurity, we need work that locates us as we are, as consumerists of the image. Because the work is so tactile -sensory response is actually stimulated through aesthetic choice- we are made aware of our visual bias and the work moves visual identity into a new state of 'seeing' or peripheral understanding. Stevenson's work points to the manipulation of tradition, the deconstruction of visual aesthetic and the contemplation of craft material. The sticky, the sappy, the waxen slippage between past present and future is our current western location. As dominion continues and neocolonialism creeps throughout our socially constructed boundaries; this hybridization takes on bizarre renditions of Bernini encrusted with mucusy flora, an opening up of our circumscribed perusal.

when will people get back into theory?

?

"The museum has become a storehouse of human values, a cultural bloodbank." -M.M.

Who's values?