A Yoshitomo Nara Day

Artwork: Yoshitomo Nara, recent sketch, 2021

Yep—feel like hiding from the world in my hoodie today…

Poetic Cosmos of the Breath

At the heart of Tomas Saraceno’s art is the questioning and reorientation of human beings and their experience of the earth, its atmosphere, environments, and non-human species. Saraceno’s practice connects art with life sciences and social sciences to create immersive projects that reimagine a world free from carbon, extractivism, capitalism, patriarchy and fossil fuels. 

 Saraceno’s participative installation at the Artist Airshow in Gunpowder Park London, 2007, titled Poetic Cosmos of the Breath brought his utopian vision of designing spaces such as cities that float in the air and change forms like clouds, to earth. This beautiful work involved creating a synesthetic experience using a giant dome made from iridescent foil weighted by sandbags that gradually inflated with increasing hot air as the sun rose. It invited people to interact with the natural rhythms of the sun, air, clouds, sky and a shifting rainbow of colours as the foil reflected and refracted light; to explore the boundaries of their perceptions with the natural elements of the earth and its atmosphere; to dream and imagine life lived in a cloud.

don't judge me

FKA twigs, Headie One and Fred again have teamed up to produce this powerful and stunning song and video, Don’t Judge Me, which is about being Black and British and having to deal with an “invisible oppressor”, namely cultural and institutional systemic racism, forces that are hard to see and act against.

What contributes to the impact of the video is the backdrop of American artist Kara Walker’s installation at the Tate Turbine Hall last year, Fons Americanus, a 13-metre tall fountain inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London. The installation subverts the celebration of British Empire and instead parodies the use of such memorials to elevate a narrative built on the hidden histories of the victor’s fortunes built on the transatlantic slave trade, exploitation, racism, and tragedy. Water is a key theme in the sculpture referring to this movement of slaves between Africa, Europe and America. And the figures Walker has sculpted in this faux-triumphal work are grotesque often bloated, throat’s slit, in shark-infested water, lives imperilled, anguished—making visible black children, women and men whose lives have been exploited and erased using the visual language of the perpetrators.

Walker is best known for her black cut-out silhouette wall installations depicting narratives of atrocities committed in the American South, and has said: “I’m gonna take everything I do about power and desire – and use the tropes of the slave narrative or the slave romance, like the antebellum romance, as the way to talk about these themes because this is something that clearly won’t go away. It will just keep being an unaddressed bugaboo in American culture.”

hope

What a gorgeous soul! Arlo Parks. She’s a poet/artist and her new track Hope from her upcoming album Collapsed in Sunbeams (Jan 29) hits the heart, as does the video which I posted here. Just beautiful.

remember

It’s critical to remember what can happen when fascism is unchecked. January 27 is Holocaust Remembrance Day. So I thought I’d share this, Italian artist Eron’s poetic tribute to a beautiful soul, writer Anne Frank, who died in Auschwitz, and whose diary has been read by countless people the world over.

Remember, because we can’t afford to forget.

(www.eron.it; @eron_artist)

Poetry Matters

Poetry matters.

And THIS. Listen to poet Amanda Gorman’s performance of her poem, The Hill We Climb, at the 2021 US Presidential Inauguration.

I got the chills listening to it. She nailed it.

On writing the poem, Gorman said this:

“America is messy. It’s still in its early development of all that we can become. And I have to recognise that in the poem. I can’t ignore that or erase it. And so, I crafted an inaugural poem that recognises these scars and these wounds. Hopefully, it will move us toward healing them.”

Chill

Trying to chill (and ignore the crazy news cycle coming from the US!), and I’ve got this on repeat, PawPaw Rod’s track HIT EM WHERE IT HURTS. Love it. Check it out.

Baby Yoda!!

Already missing The Mandalorian and can’t wait for season 3! Here’s Baby Yoda (Grogu) chilling on set with director Robert Rodriguez—cuteness overload! 😊

Eternal Luv

Artwork: mural by @ger_1, ‘Eternal Luv’, Athens, Greece, 2020

Beautiful—mural by @ger1_, Eternal Luv in Athens, Greece, 2020.

And the New Year—a kinder, brighter, lighter, hopeful and loving 2021.

ciao 2020!!

Artwork: by Blub (@blub_lartesanuotare)

Caio 2020!

Artwork by Florentine artist Blub (@blub_lartesanuotare), inspired by Botticelli’s depiction of the west wind Zephyr and nymph Chloris in Birth of Venus (1483-5).

Kind of perfect.

never-ever be afraid to colour outside the lines

Image: clean slate/blank wall—WRDSMTH (@wrdsmth) beginning a paste-up

Love this. WRDSMTH’s holiday/New Year’s message made up of select words/lines from his paste-ups:

follow your calling
trust your talent
chase your dream
believe in yourself
take a chance
dive headfirst into pools of unknown
fail better
do it for yourself
do what makes you happy
do what you love
aspire to inspire others
create — every single day
purple trees red bears green oceans
blue elephants
do something every day that scares you
if not now, when?
make your mark
and never-ever be afraid to color outside the lines
🚀

(@WRDSMTH)

fake plastic trees

2020—what can I say? This year has been a freaking rollercoaster. It’s been stressful, challenging, devastating, enlightening, hopeful. The holiday season—whatever you might celebrate (or not feel like celebrating)—and New Year’s has a lot of people thinking, well fuck 2020! Music has always been a cornerstone of my life, and this year especially I’ve turned to it for escape, freedom, solace and joy. So here’s something that made my heart smile and brought tears to my eyes, the amazing artists Phoebe Bridgers and Arlo Parks teaming up to play Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees. And if that’s not enough, Phoebe is wearing a skeleton onesie and they’re singing in a church. It’s just an awesome mix that reminds me what’s beautiful and possible in this world (and ignore the BBC promo schtick at the end!!!).

Star Force: Sci-Fisolation

The freakishly funny, zero-budget, pandemic-isolation short film, Star Force: Sci-Fisolation! Starring James McAvoy, Caitriona Balfe, Steven Cree, Kevin Mains, Brendan O'Rourke, James Kirk, Ross Mains, and Chris Forbes.

When out-of-work actors, directors and screen writers are bored…they get incredibly silly and have a lot of fun. Enjoy! 😊

World Human Rights Day

Artwork: Billboard by Jeremy Deller for World Human Rights Day, UK, 2020

On December 10 in Paris, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights document was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly. To mark World Human Rights Day, British artist Jeremy Deller (@jeremydeller) in collaboration with the designer Fraser Muggeridge and Jack Arts Agency has created a series of billboards across the UK, highlighting places in the world where people are denied their fundamental rights. These include Xinjiang Province China, Evin Prison Tehran, the Amazon Rainforest, the Mediterranean Sea, Brook House Immigration Removal Centre in Gatwick in the UK, Flint Michigan, Riyadh Saudi Arabia, the Amazon rainforest, Ecatepec Mexico, and Khirbet Humsah Occupied West Bank. 

Artwork: Billboard by Jeremy Deller for World Human Rights Day, UK, 2020

Regarding the project, Jeremy Deller stated: “Violation of human rights exists everywhere, regardless of what else is going on in the world and we wanted to say that today is Human Rights Day for people across the world, even if they aren’t having their rights respected. There were thousands of locations to choose from”. 

The posters will be up until the end of the month. And rightly, Deller said: “Really this is just a reminder. Every day should be Human Rights Day, that’s what I’m saying with this.”

someday I'll be king

Artwork: Marquise, Someday I'll be King [Tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat]. Pasteup on Boulevard de Picpus, Paris 12th

Gorgeous paste-up by Parisian artist Marquise (@marquis.streetart), titled Someday I'll be King (Tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat), on Boulevard de Picpus, Paris 12th.

Templates of Love

Image: eL Seed with one of his early calligraffitis, one of the Arabic words for ‘Love’ (@elseed)

French-Tunisian artist eL See’s current solo exhibition in Milan at Galleria Patricia Armocida (@galleriapatriciaarmocida) is titled Templates of Love and was inspired by the 50 possible ways the word ‘love’ occurs in Arabic. He had this to say about what inspired him for this show:

“What is love? It’s an eternal question humanity is constantly seeking to answer. Try as we might that single word remains slippery, easy to say, harder to define, in different languages around the world it’s often a single word that contains multitudes. 

In Arabic there are fifty words for love. It was a fact that struck me deeply when I first learnt it. Love in Arabic is not confined to a single shape, it moves in many phrases and expres-sions, it has many forms and each carries its own name. In that expansion I discovered how love found new ways to linger in the language I was learning, and how that language had grown to encompass the varied forms love can take. I came to realise love cannot be contained. It is not a single thing, it lives among us, it is many-sided, multifaceted, at times literally: love comes to us with many faces. It’s a force that lives with and between many bodies and many minds. In this exhibition I wanted to explore and celebrate the myriad ex-pressions of love that we can find in language and in the world.

I searched for the lines we follow, working to capture a sense of the varied shapes love can take. As I painted, putting pigment to canvas, it became a dance, a choreography of its own, a manifesting of love. Taking the architecture of the Arabic language I translated the words for love into my own personal script: loops of ribbon-like brushstrokes. The canvases became alters to the templates we are given for emotion through language, but also function as a creative key to understand the limits of form itself. When I look at the works I have made collectively I now see that I didn’t use black ink as I normally do. At a dark time in history I had instead moved away from the darkness. Love works to honour the light. Without even realising it I had adapted my process to the power of love: it called for some-thing more from me.”

Shakespeare & Co

Photo: Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 2020

From one of my favourite bookshops in the world! Shakespeare and Company in Paris, this gorgeous poem by Persian lyric poet, Hafiz: “I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.”

Also, this wonderful 70yr old institution is in trouble! The pandemic has hit them hard, like so many businesses world-wide. If you are in a position to buy books right now, they take online orders internationally. Every book counts! Just visit www.shakespeareandcompany.com .

The end of imagination

Central to Adrian Villar Rojas’s practice is an ongoing project to produce site and temporal specific work that poses the questions: What can’t survive? What leaves no trace? Of a dialogue between what is organic and inorganic; human made or machine made; human and non-human. Since his time at art school in Rosario, Argentina, Rojas has questioned why the work he creates should last forever given his belief that humans as a species are entropic and degradable. 

For his recent exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris titled The end of imagination he states: 

"In 2010, I proposed a hypothesis: What if, in the final moments of humanity, the last of the species decided they wanted to make an artwork? It would be the last human artwork, together with all the logical implications unfolded by this fact. The end of art, end of the world and end of language are then one and the same thing: the same end. In my fabulations, reaching the shores of art created a vacuum, a silence that gave space for me to explore nonhuman perspectives. This is when I placed a new metaphor of an alien into this terminal landscape. What I call the ‘alien gaze’ expresses this impossible paradox: a subjectivity without culture."

This “alien” perspective is evident in Rojas inviting the viewer to explore his take-over of the gallery with figures, diagrams, images and a “panhuman” language based on past and present language systems, that are indecipherable yet with recognisable elements, placing the viewer in the position of that “alien” subjectivity—of having to make sense of what is experienced without any references to decode it. 

Rojas is also referencing the current situation of Covid-19 and the restrictions worldwide on travel, movement and experience. His nomadic practice has been curtailed, with hours spent watching CTV footage of feeds from Nasa satellites to orang-utans quarantined in zoos. Time is being experienced differently, as is life. With his overlay of language, texts and hieroglyphic images, Rojas muddles a sense of being able to place the work he has made within a knowable time frame. Time is a human-made construct. It is not “natural” or inherent within nature, but relative and subjective. 

Rojas further questions notions of ordering and collectively determining significance in relation to Western art. Part of his overall project has been to question the museum and its role of preserving, collecting and displaying work in perpetuity. He cites his own experiences at art school, where Latin American art was barely acknowledged in the colonial Western canon of art history. As students, pre-internet, and with art books too expensive to purchase, Rojas and his peers were given small photocopied booklets of text and reproduced images, and the result was a freeing of the imagination. As Rojas observes: “It was almost like these photocopies were shouting: there are no hard facts, only fabulation and speculation! Art Histories, or rather Art Stories, are for us students to reclaim and hack”. 

Rojas’s exhibition poses the question how the pandemic is altering our subjective experience of time, of language and of systems of representation, acknowledging that while “art” is also a construct, it is the result of human action that transforms matter and that relates to specific places and times.   

As for what that last human artwork might be for a future alien visitor/observer to find—it could be any of the detritus or mark making they encounter on this planet, having no idea what the human species ever defined ‘art’ to be in the first place.   

small worlds...

Artwork: Paste-up by Olivia Paroldi, Lyon, 2020

A girl sitting on the edge of her small world…

A beautifully poetic linocut paste-up by French printmaker Olivia Paroldi (@olivia_paroldi) in the streets of Lyon, one of a series she made during her pandemic isolation she calls “bubbles”. It has a dreamlike quality of looking out at the world while contemplating one’s own interior landscape.

Cola

Listening to Arlo Parks lately. She’s a poet/storyteller with a gorgeous voice. Here’s her song Cola from her EP Super Sad Generation (2019). For more great tracks check out Arlo on SoundCloud, her ‘Angel’s Song’ is a punch to the heart—just beautiful.