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Tracey Snelling The Last House on the Left
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Marnie Weber The Night of Forevermore
If it is said that Hieronymus Bosch draws with his brush, then Marnie Weber films with her sculptures. Marnie Weber’s The Night of Forevermore is a static space housing monsters, demons, witches, human-animal hybrids; all of which come alive with slow, repetitive gestures and sound. It’s a Hieronymous Bosch painting brought to life, a haunting world with creatures familiar and strange, each with their own woe, purpose, and revenge. Bosch’s paintings are infamously crowded, layered with forms of life and death co-mingling in this liminal boundary between heaven and hell. It is an area of foretold ghosts. And retained within the picture plain and filmic frame, Weber’s animated sculpture remain spread across the entire tableau but firmly placed on an individual stage.
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Charles Ray Unpainted Sculpture
Nearly two years in the making, this work is a life-size fiberglass cast of a 1991 Pontiac Grand Am that was totaled in a deadly accident. Like many of Charles Ray’s works, Unpainted Sculpture was in part the result of a chance occurrence. During a dinner conversation with a student whose car had been repeatedly involved in accidents, Ray suggested that he simply reconstruct the car’s dented bumper, cast it in fiberglass, and reattach it. When another student pointed out that this would be a good idea for one of Ray’s sculptures, a project was born. The artist spent more than two months searching insurance lots, looking for wrecks in which fatalities had occurred. He hoped to locate a vehicle that would transcend the specificities of any particular accident and would therefore attain the level of a “perfect” version of a crashed car. Purchasing the wreck from an auction, Ray painstakingly took the car apart, individually casting each element in fiberglass, and reassembled it piece by piece, as if it were a model hobby kit. The entire work was then uniformly covered with two coats of gray paint. The color—like the body-shop primer normally found underneath the high-gloss finish—lends the sculpture a disinterested quality, a flatness and silence, despite the drama of the event that produced the original wreck.
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Jesse McLean Remote (excerpt)
In the collage video Remote, dream logic invokes a presence that drifts through physical and temporal barriers. There is a presence lingering in the dark woods, just under the surface of a placid lake and at the end of dreary basement corridor. It’s not easy to locate because it’s outside but also inside. It doesn’t just crawl in on your wires because it’s not a thing. It’s a shocking eruption of electrical energy.
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Zeger Reyers Rotating Kitchen
Zeger Reyers’s Rotating Kitchen tilts on its axis, making a revolution every fifteen minutes with falling food and crushing glassware. According to the artist the piece is a re-imagination of a kitchen as a whole planet and the world as a kitchen.
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Dongwook Lee Various sculptures
Dongwook Lee's works focus on the contradictions that are fundamentally inherent in human existence and life. Exquisitely hyper-realistic and surrealistically imagined renditions of his miniature human figures are staged in absurd situations in Lee's works, in which the bleak everyday life transforms into poetic horror. In Lee’s work, a fragile warrior is wearing his own flesh as his armor, and the naked child stands with innocent face in front of blood-stained killing (which he might have committed). His oeuvre stands at an odd intersection of life and death, beauty and cruelty, civilization and wild, and reality and fantasy, unfolding a world of fantasy where people are severed from reality.
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Robert B. Lisek Random Blast
People are extremely bad at generating random sequences. People behave in a mechanic and repetitive manner. Human brain aims to conceive reality within periodic sequences and patterns. This is why most sequences and rhythms we encounter in art and music are repetitive. The existing computing machines don't generate random sequences; the so called pseudo-generators of random numbers are periodic. This is why the project reaches quantum states which are highly randomized and can be used for generating random numbers. The radioactive disintegration of Tor is converted into light-sound impulses.
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David Zink Yi Untitled (Architeuthis)
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Miraikan Museum, Tokyo Fear Experiment: Science of a Haunted House
A haunted house is not something you would expect to find at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan), but this latest special exhibition begins with just that — an experience that spooks visitors with dank passageways, glowing fireball spirits, eerie floating ghosts and noisy poltergeists. The science behind the “phenomena” isn’t revealed until you emerge from “the house” to find out that its four rooms have been strategically set up to illustrate different themes: Change in Structure of Matter; Electricity and Magnetism; Mountain Monsters and Sea Creatures; Light and Mirrors; Sound, Power and Kinetic Energy; The Brain; and Life.
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Raši Todosijević Gott liebt die Serben (God Loves the Serbs)
Beginning in the 1970s Belgrade-based artist Raši Todosijević began titling his works in German “for its sternness, and to criticize the totalitarian spirit” (Todosijević, 2005). During the 1980-90s he produced a large body of installations, Gott liebt die Serben (God Loves the Serbs), that arranged ordinary domestic objects; wardrobes, suitcases, cabinets, in the form of a swastika that he installed in the room.
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Stéphane Vigny Perceuse à sauter
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Andrea Hasler Embrace the Base
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Brian Butler Aleister Crowley's The Bartzabel Working
Los Angeles-based artist Brian Butler is an icon in an occult subculture that has blossomed over the last decade. A would be polymath—artist, filmmaker, musician, and writer—Butler's persona has been constructed around an overt dedication to the black arts, and a willingness to make public the rituals and tenets of a faith that have traditionally been kept secret by others. That, along with his ties to people with infamous reputations, most notably Kenneth Anger, have made him equally lauded and reviled. The scene in question—Butler's latest and most grandiose display—was a public performance of Aleister Crowley's The Bartzabel Working. Based on techniques of evocation found in medieval grimoires, the ritual was written in 1910 and designed to manifest Bartzabel, a traditional spirit of Mars in Western occultism, through a hooded person placed in a magical triangle. The crowd, which packed the gallery's courtyard, was the largest ever assembled to witness a Crowleyan rite.
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Maria Rubinke Various porcelains
The Danish artist Maria Rubinke works with the classic porcelain figure, where she allows the incomprehensible and chaotic in the human subconscious to rise to the surface. The pure white porcelain surface attracts the gaze of the viewer, but at the same time distorts our presuppositions when the small porcelain girls are slowly broken down and subjected to contrast-filled madness.
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Odani Motohiko Phantom-Limb
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William Eggleston Outskirts of Morton, Mississippi, Halloween
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Kouri Ib
Ib is a game about a young girl who goes to an art exhibition with her parents. The exhibition is a retrospective on an artist named Guertena, whose work can best be described as a mashup of contemporary art, running the gamut of painting, sculpture, “outsider”-style modern art, and basically anything else you can think of. Ib wanders away from her parents and through the gallery, returning after she has viewed all the work in order to find that her parents have disappeared. Then she gets swallowed by the artwork. The rest of the game is spent moving through a dreamlike world based on Guertena’s art. The game moves along via narrative events and puzzles that facilitate the narrative, mostly in the classic adventure game model of “find something and take it to a place,” although this is occasionally interrupted by moving block puzzles. Then, at the end of the game, the narrative choices that you have made pay off in the form of a hierarchy of endings that go from “really nice” to “absolutely, incredibly sad.”
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Eléonore Saintagnan Le Cercle
This video is 10 minutes long; a class of teenagers, I’m guessing about 13, maybe 14 years old, being asked questions by the film-maker in front of a flickering projection of these blurry and barren deserts and prairies. They look bored, confused, anxious, teenage. Even more so because the questions they’re being asked have been cut from the edit entirely, replaced with a brooding, Nick Cave-y western score.
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Hiker Meat is an exploitation film that never actually existed. Both the film and its 1970s Italian director, Jesus Rinzoli, have been imagined by Jamie Shovlin to represent an archetype of the genre. Low budget exploitation movies boomed from the late 1960s to the early 1980s as their makers, intent on financial success, exploited popular trends and lurid subject matter including sex, sensational violence, gore, ‘freaks’ and drug use. Set in an American summer camp in the 1970s, Hiker Meat is both an affectionate homage to and an academic deconstruction of the exploitation genre. It includes a full complement of horror and slasher film standards; from a hitchhiking heroine with a troubled past to a charismatic commune leader, and a group of teenagers who disappear one by one.
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Unknown Singing Android Heads
This is a piece of "art" by a really sucky artist that I can't even believe even has the gall to CONSIDER themselves an artist. The piece is for sale at the Art Basel Fair in Miami Beach. The asking price? $75,000. I'd rather eat shit! The heads are connected to servos behind the mold of the artist's face that are controlled by a computer. The movements and sound are on a 15 minute loop and both sing together and uncomfortably look around the room individually.
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Paul Pfeiffer Dutch Interior
Dutch Interior was inspired by the film The Amityville Horror, 1979. Pfeiffer was particularly interested by the interplay of two points of view in The Amityville Horror, that of the human characters and that of a satanic presence. He was struck by the role played by the staircase in the film which became ‘a central corridor along which a meeting of gazes occurs between the human inhabitants, the family, and this non-human inhabitant, the devil.’ (PBS Pfeiffer 2004). Pfeiffer recalls: ‘there’s many really disturbing scenes where you’re looking down the staircase at the family coming up or looking up the staircase at the priest coming down.’
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Paul McCarthy Train, Mechanical
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p.s. Hey. ** Keaton, Yeah, it's pretty big, and it does seem to kind of double in size at night, so it makes for a serious topple, especially if you miss the platform thing on your way down, which I guess the techno guy did. Paris does change, but only if you carry around a magnifying glass. I never thought of 'Tryptich' that way, wow. That's a psychedelic way to think about it. ** David Ehrenstein, Funny how so many of the Nobel Prize winners are hardly read in the US. Oh, gosh, I'm not sure what people are reading here. Probably all over the place. They have popular junk fiction here just like everywhere else. I think right now a lot of people are reading this popular, mostly respected writer Christine Angot because her new novel is just out. She does 'auto-fiction', as the French call it. She seems to write the same book about having had an incestuous affair with her father when she was young over and over. I tried reading a little of her, and I thought it wasn't very good. Oh, that was a very fine Stonewall piece! I admire it and learned a lot. Kudos! I only glanced at that article you linked to, but I'll read it later. At the glance, it looks pretty past-romanticizing and sour and doomy. Oh, shit, it was Bresson's birthday yesterday? I used to make sure I celebrated it every year, but this year I spaced. Shit, I'll do something Bressonian belatedly. ** James, Hi. I wrote to you. I hope the tiny address add helps. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! I really, really like the film. The trajectory and build and layering are gorgeous. Respect. Man, thanks, that's really kind of you to say about my stuff. I hope you find Zac's and my film interesting, obviously. Yeah, it's great to get to start to know your work, and thank you so much again! ** Marcus Mamourian, Well, hi! Warmest greetings from my apartment in Paris! How's BU? What are doing there? Tell me more. xx, me. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, cool. Michael Salerno was just raving to me about 'GM' not even two days ago. It seems that he liked it a lot more than you did. Huh. Everyone, go here to read Steve's review of the new, hotly tipped, polarizing Austrian horror film 'Goodnight Mommy', and then go here to read his overview of the impending New York Film Festival. If you see the new Chantal Akerman, please share what you think. Obviously, I'm excited to see that. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. 'The Trolley' is really beautiful. It's one of the most overlooked Simons, I think because it came out so late in his life, but it's full of riches. Oh, cool, thank you from the excited sidelines for sending Chris your video. Man, I hope I get to see that piece somehow. ** _Black_Acrylic , Hi, Ben. ** Brendan, Hi, B. Ooh, that big commissioned piece sounds great. I don't remember if you were around here when your last show was up, but I really loved the images I saw online of the work and of the show. Cool, glad you're liking the book so far. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Like I said to David, it's interesting that, even though Simon won the Nobel Prize, he, like so many of the Nobel winners, hardly get read in the US. Over here, a Nobel Prize turns its recipient into an immediate best seller. I would guess roids' effect on a body has a lot to do with that body's genetics. You know, like how someone can smoke all their lives and never get cancer, and another person can smoke for two years and die of lung cancer. Weird stuff. Halloween celebrating will depend on where I'll be, and that's still being figured out. You can bet that any spooky houses within reach of wherever I am will be visited. ** Bill, Hi. Wait, holy shit, you saw Joy Williams read? In the flesh? Oh my God! I would do something like kill something to see her do a reading. She's one of the small number of people on my 'want to have coffee and talk with before I or she dies' list. Wow, I envy you severely. ** H, Hi. Oh, that's okay. My scanner's all fucked up. I sympathize. I've only read very little Colm Toibin. A number of people I respect really like his work. My short dip into ... a novel of his, I think, I can't remember, didn't do much for me, but I've hardly even given his stuff a chance. I will. ** Right. Halloween prep continues around here today through the vehicle of contemporary art. Check it. See you tomorrow.