Posts Tagged ‘Art’

An interesting and charming work by the French photographer Laurent Nivalle, posted with his permission:

More work by Laurent can be seen on his website

Betelnut is a stimulant sold in many Asian countries. It’s a red wpowder you chew and it’s supposed to make you relaxed. They use it a lot in India and it gives people that famous red tongue. I tried it, but I didn’t like it much. It didn’t make me feel relaxed at all!

Betelnut is often sold by sexy dressed young girls in small streetside booths. A couple of years ago, artist Annamarie Ho recreated a Betel nut booth as a gallery installation commenting on this “sexually provocative sales style” in which, it would seem, customers are buying interaction with the salesperson as much as they’re paying for the Betelnut. For the next two weekends, Annamarie is reviving the piece, Binlang Xi Shi (Betelnut Girls), but this time in the more unpredictable location of a New York City storefront.

Visit Betelnut Girls

Laura Lipton is an American born artist who lives in London now. She gave me permission to post some images from her ‘haunted dollhouse’ work which you can see below. Laura Lipton is an exceptionally skilled drawing artist who creates works with almost impossible detail levels. Besides that, her work is also conceptually interesting and very atmospheric. She has a show opening on 11 October in Santa Monica, Florida, called ‘Day of the Dead’. Lots of her work is inspired by tales and (mexican) folk traditions.

“The Haunted Doll’s House”,charcoal & pencil on paper, 55″ x 80″ (with doors open)

An interesting installation by the Israel-born artist Guy Ben-Ner, who currently lives in New York. We see him pose on a paradisical island in his kitchen home and as some sort of Abraham in a self-constructed symbolic tree, an installation called ‘tree house kit’:

I wouldn’t be surprised if the tree was build entirely from IKEA parts! It’s hard to say why this work touches me – maybe it has something to do with the iconic idea of the father in the tree, christmas, or maybe with the weird symbolism of the whole piece.

You can see the whole installation here

Fusion plays a very important role in my life. It is one of the core ingredients for me that make an artwork into an artwork. Why is ‘throw down your arms’, of which I posted a song three posts earlier, an impressive record for me? It’s because O’Conner manages to completely emulate a different culture than her own and become more rasta than the most fanatic dreadlock. This is the power of fusion and it must not be confused with the power of crossover or any derridian principles. The power of fusion doesn’t mix two different cultures, it creates a completely new culture by completely possessing and overturning an existant one.

Lots of people are hostile to this power. O’Conner got countless negative comments from so called ‘true rastafarians’ who couldn’t appreciate someone was actually redefining the genre. People who live in dogmatic houses, for whom reality will be a fixed hierarchy forever; they are the enemies of art, poetry and music but they have no idea.

It dawned on me that this is also a reason I often dislike so-called experimental art, poetry or music. Because it so clearly conforms to the limits of the genre. Why doesn’t someone invent classical music one can actually dance to? I tell you why: because it is much harder than simply conforming to the limits of the genre. I am sorry but so many experimental works somehow do exactly what I would expect them to do. So much experimental poetry is so utterly predictable in its formalistic rationality.

Apollo and Dionysus, very few artists manage to get them both to dance.