DISCONTINUED.

AU REVOIR BLOGGER. it's been a fun four months.

Annette Messager's Mes Voeux

"Mes Voeux (my wishes) is a series comprising individually framed photos and in some version fragments of text which refer to the images pinned by strings to the gallery wall. The images are an array of female and male body parts of people of various ages. Each example of the work can be taken in as a unified field but as the viewer's eye moves in the whole ensemble dissolves into a shifting pattern of associations. Messager fragments the body into named parts-- eyes, ears, geitals, mouths, hands, and so on-- so that the images become a visual equivalent of nouns. The movement of the eye around the work becomes an involuntary listing that accumulates but can never retain the entirety."

Joseph Kosuth

"Kosuth had the idea of juxtaposing textual description with its physical reference in 1965. In box cube empty clear glass (pictured below) each of the four words of the cubes propped side by side against the wall reading the words and looking at the glass occur at the same time and produce the same meaning. the relationship between photography and written language as alternative forms of reference is the subject of the tripartite, retrospectively titled Proto-Investigations conceived in the same year to which One and Three Chairs belongs(pictured above). These present three versions of a utilitarian object- The physical object, a life size photograph of it and an enlarged facsimile of its dictionary definition- placed alongside each other. The object in this case a chair is flanked by the two representation emphasizing the conceptual relationships and disparities between it. it's definition and its visual image."

Bill Sullivan (click to enlarge)

10 self portraits by Claude Cahun

Giuseppe Penone's to reverse one's eyes

'"Mirrored lenses, when placed over my eyes, indicate the point that separates me from that which surrounds me. They are like a skin, a border element, the interruption of a channel of information...by blocking my vision I eliminate data necessary for my subsequent behaviour."
-Guiseppe Penone

"The Mirrored lenses were originally used for an action documented through a series of photographs by paolo mussat sartor. The artist's vision is presented as a literal reflector of his environment. The urban landscape mirrored in the lenses changes as the artist changes his position in relation to it. However, since the lenses effectively blind him, Penone suggests that the artist's relationship with his creativity drives his gaze back into himself."

Lieko Shiga

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Bas Jan Ader's I'm too sad to tell you

"Ader sent this photograph of himself crying in the form of postcards to friends and acquaintances. Only the date and the message, "I'm too sad to tell you" were written on the reverse. Alternative wording he considered at the time included: "the space between us fills my heart with intolerable grief" and "the thoughts of our inevitable and seperate deaths fill my heart with intolerable grief." I'm too Sad...hinges not on the source of the artist's tears but on the re enacting of his private sadness for the camera. The image depends on the artifice and melodrama of the artist's act of placing himself before the camera while crying. As such, it questions our notions of authenticity in expression-- how is it that Ader convinces us he is sincere? through a denial of information-- "im too sad to tell you"-- Ader creates a sense of limitlessness in the extenet and source of grief and imaginative gap that we are forced to fill for ourselves with our own experience of sadness. As critic James Roberts has written: 'thre reason for his real crying is "a secret" known only by a few close friends but it is apparently important that we know there IS a reason.'"

Marina Abramovic and Ulay

"Abramovic and Ulay collaborated for several years for an opening at the Galleria Comunale D'arte Moderna, Bologna. they stood naked, facing each other in the main entrance, forcing the public entering the museum to choose which naked body to face--male or female --as they squeezed through the small space between the two artists. As each member of the public passed awkwardly between the two naked bodies they were filmed by a hidden camera and saw themselives being projected on monitors placed nearby. text on the wall by the monitors read: "Imponderable/such imponderable human factors/as one's aesthetic sensitivity/the overrinding importance/of imponderables in determining/human contact" The piece forced people to confront their attitudes and feelings about gender and sexuality, and the body of the "other" through a direct physical intervention in the architecture of both a building and a social event. They had planned to be the museum's "living door" for three hours but after 90 minutes their performance was stopped by the police."

Jackson Eaton

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Aaron Ruell

Jen Davis

Series: Self-portraits

Series: Men

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