|
Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
View current page
...more recent posts
Some images from Goin' Postal, a fabulous show of mail art curated by Miles Collyer. On view at Art Metropole until November 24th. Thanks for the pictures, Miles!
Above: wooden envelope/postcards sent to Art Metropole anonymously by Lucy Pullen and her class.
Below: images from Kevin Immanuel's project, The Foucault Letters (2001 & 2007) in which he purchased memberships to Canadian galleries under the name Michel Foucault.
Below: a selection of mail sent between Marc Bell, Jason MacLean and Terry Piercey (with artists' labels).
Diana, Princess of Wales. I WON. I WON.
(Ed Pien did the retarded pumpkin on the right. He and a bunch of other jealous also-rans are threatening to chase me around with their cell phone cameras until my Diana pumpkin smashes against a wall)
This also counts as a Canada Council KEY MOMENT in my art career making me the anointed one for the next 12 months. (Luis Jacob is so last summer)
I rarely go to About.com, the info site owned by the New York Times, there's something about the page layout and the logo that I can't stand. (except I went there for tips on pumpkin carving prior to creating last year's non-award winning masterpiece ) But I will overcome my distaste for friendly orange spheres because they have hired one of my favourite writers, the brilliantly witty, informed and cranky Pierre Tristam of Candide's Notebooks to create the content for their new Middle East Issues site.
Lisa Kiss, super desinger extraordinaire, just won an OAAG award for her design of our Neutrinos They Are Very Small catalogue. Yay.
The evening primrose is my favourite plant. I think there are a bunch of varieties. The ones in our garden are weedy things that slowly take the shape of pokey spikes. They produce little yellow blooms that open at sunset and die off the next afternoon. Me and VB tend toward the nocturnal ourselves, and we like to sit outside in the evening. This scraggly little plant, popping open new buds every single night, makes very good company.
This week's little image assignment for school is about "the gaze."
 |
Vito Acconic, Theme Song, 1973 video, 33 minutes sample dialogue: Look right in here, right into me. Oh look how my body’s waiting for you. We don’t have to worry about tomorrow, we don’t have to worry about forever, it just has to be about now. We don’t need any illusions, we don’t want any illusions, right? Sure, you can be on stage, you can be on stage with me. I’ll put you in the spotlight! I’ll admire you, I’ll love you. I’ll watch every move you make. You’re gonna let me be all alone. You’re gonna leave me before we even had a chance to get started. I’ll remember the time when we could’ve been together. Oh wouldn’t you have wanted to be a memory for me? Wouldn’t you have wanted to be fixed in my mind? |
|
Vito Acconci activates ‘the gaze’ in a most aggressive and frustrating manner. The artist lies on a carpet — his face seemingly crushed up against the inside of the monitor's screen — attempting to seduce the viewer to join him in the space that he inhabits. It is a prolonged monologue, conducted an unpleasant, bar-stool tone of seedy, hasty need. Yet at times, watching this video, I thought about succumbing, if only to stem Acconci’s relentless flow of sleaze. But of course, this creature addressing me is not a person, it’s an artwork, and I am categorically, ontologically unable to join Acconci in his representational space, even when I reluctantly agree to do so. As viewers, we are both tantalized and rebuked. We gaze and the artwork appears to gaze back. We are implicated by the representational gaze, but it remains remote. As with Lacan’s glittering sardine can (see comments), we are not seen by that which we behold. Seduced, and then rejected — by an artwork! It’s shameful but it’s also deeply funny. I walked away from Theme Song laughing and feeling that despite (or because of), the existential gaps and voids, I’d been given a weird little gift. see the video here (but it's better full screen on a tv monitor) |
|