Saturday, 28 February 2009
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
memories
At the weekend I did an experiment involving wrapping people up in clingfilm, those pictures aren't going to be posted up on this but here is what is left of the event...
Saturday, 21 February 2009
claustrophobia
again from wikipedia:
Basic symptoms of claustrophobia
Claustrophobia is typically thought to have two key symptoms: fear of restriction and fear of suffocation. A typical claustrophobic will fear restriction in at least one, if not several, of the following areas: small rooms, locked rooms, tunnels, cellars, elevators, subway trains, caves, and crowded areas. Additionally, the fear of restriction can cause some claustrophobics to fear trivial matters such as sitting in a barber’s chair or waiting in line at a grocery store simply out of a fear of confinement to a single space. However, claustrophobics are not necessarily afraid of these areas themselves, but, rather, they fear what could happen to them should they become confined to said area. Often, when confined to an area, claustrophobics begin to fear suffocation, believing that there may be a lack of air in the area to which they are confined. Any combination of the above symptoms can lead to severe panic attacks. However, most claustrophobics do everything in their power to avoid these situations.[2]
Basic symptoms of claustrophobia
Claustrophobia is typically thought to have two key symptoms: fear of restriction and fear of suffocation. A typical claustrophobic will fear restriction in at least one, if not several, of the following areas: small rooms, locked rooms, tunnels, cellars, elevators, subway trains, caves, and crowded areas. Additionally, the fear of restriction can cause some claustrophobics to fear trivial matters such as sitting in a barber’s chair or waiting in line at a grocery store simply out of a fear of confinement to a single space. However, claustrophobics are not necessarily afraid of these areas themselves, but, rather, they fear what could happen to them should they become confined to said area. Often, when confined to an area, claustrophobics begin to fear suffocation, believing that there may be a lack of air in the area to which they are confined. Any combination of the above symptoms can lead to severe panic attacks. However, most claustrophobics do everything in their power to avoid these situations.[2]
sweating
From wikipedia:
Sweating allows the body to regulate its temperature. Sweating is controlled from a center in the preoptic and anterior regions of the hypothalamus where thermosensitive neurons are located. The heat regulatory function of the hypothalamus is also affected by inputs from temperature receptors in the skin. High skin temperature reduces the hypothalamic set point for sweating and increases the gain of the hypothalamic feedback system in response to variations in core temperature. Overall, however, the sweating response to a rise in hypothalamic ('core') temperature is much larger than the response to the same increase in average skin temperature. The process of sweating decreases core temperature, whereas the process of evaporation decreases surface temperature.
There are two situations in which our nerves will stimulate sweat glands making us sweat: during physical heat, and emotional stress. Emotionally induced sweating is generally restricted to palms, soles, and sometimes the forehead, while physical heat induced sweating occurs throughout the body. [3]
Sweat is not pure water; it always contains a small amount (0.2 - 1%) of solute. When a person moves from a cold climate to a hot climate, adaptive changes occur in their sweating mechanisms. This process is referred to as acclimatisation: the maximum rate of sweating increases and its solute composition decreases. The volume of water lost in sweat daily is highly variable, ranging from 100 to 8,000 mL/day. The solute loss can be as much as 350 mmol/day (or 90 mmol/day acclimatised) of sodium under the most extreme conditions. In a cool climate & in the absence of exercise, sodium loss can be very low (less than 5 mmols/day). Sodium concentration in sweat is 30-65 mmol/l, depending on the degree of acclimatisation.
[edit]
Sweating allows the body to regulate its temperature. Sweating is controlled from a center in the preoptic and anterior regions of the hypothalamus where thermosensitive neurons are located. The heat regulatory function of the hypothalamus is also affected by inputs from temperature receptors in the skin. High skin temperature reduces the hypothalamic set point for sweating and increases the gain of the hypothalamic feedback system in response to variations in core temperature. Overall, however, the sweating response to a rise in hypothalamic ('core') temperature is much larger than the response to the same increase in average skin temperature. The process of sweating decreases core temperature, whereas the process of evaporation decreases surface temperature.
There are two situations in which our nerves will stimulate sweat glands making us sweat: during physical heat, and emotional stress. Emotionally induced sweating is generally restricted to palms, soles, and sometimes the forehead, while physical heat induced sweating occurs throughout the body. [3]
Sweat is not pure water; it always contains a small amount (0.2 - 1%) of solute. When a person moves from a cold climate to a hot climate, adaptive changes occur in their sweating mechanisms. This process is referred to as acclimatisation: the maximum rate of sweating increases and its solute composition decreases. The volume of water lost in sweat daily is highly variable, ranging from 100 to 8,000 mL/day. The solute loss can be as much as 350 mmol/day (or 90 mmol/day acclimatised) of sodium under the most extreme conditions. In a cool climate & in the absence of exercise, sodium loss can be very low (less than 5 mmols/day). Sodium concentration in sweat is 30-65 mmol/l, depending on the degree of acclimatisation.
[edit]
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
tony oursler
TONY OURSLER
His work relates to the body in space, sexuality, the power of images and social relationships. I find his videos funny but also pretty scary.
Thursday, 12 February 2009
NY Magazine
THE ART REVIEW
MoMA’s Sex Change
The museum’s Pipilotti Rist show cheekily feminizes a bastion of masculinity.
By Jerry Saltz Published Dec 28, 2008
(Photo: Frederick Charles/Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Installation of Piplotti Rist's "Pour Your Body Out" Courtesy of the Artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, London )
The deliciously named Swiss miss Pipilotti Rist, who for two decades has been ravishing viewers with her fiesta-colored video visions, has risen to new heights of trippy bliss. Her opulently beautiful 25-by-200-foot wraparound video at MoMA—complete with two round breast-shaped projector pods protruding from the walls and close-ups of pink tulips, a black pig, and a fleshy nude—is catnip for the eye and a hormonal rush for an institution badly in need of one. It is one of the most seductively rebellious artistic gestures since Lynda Benglis’s notorious Artforum ad in 1974, for which she posed naked wielding a dildo. Benglis’s action slapped a biased art world awake; Rist’s Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) suspends us in a primordial sea of liquids, and performs a metaphysical sex change on the Museum of Modern Art. The atrium of this bastion of masculinism becomes a womb, and the museum itself a woman. In an abstract way, Rist makes the institution ovulate.
Rist’s installation is an impregnation and an incantation. It is also an exorcism. As I’ve said in these pages before, MoMA is—even with this show and the current Marlene Dumas survey—a place where very little work by women is on view, at least in the permanent collection. Rist’s installation comments on and reacts to this misogyny. She has hung magenta-colored draperies almost to the ceiling of the atrium, making it a ballroom, a Hopper movie theater, a bordello, or a living room. Her monolithic projected images caress and dissolve the hard-edged architecture. Drowsy droning music plays; bells ting-a-ling. The atrium has been carpeted, and a large circular couch with a hole in the middle has replaced Barnett Newman’s phallic Broken Obelisk. Shoes and coats are everywhere. People lie around, lean on walls, sleep, and sprawl in groups on the floor and couch. On one of my visits, the well-known painter Gary Stephan drifted by and said, “I wish I had some ganja.” This is museum as hallucination, opium den, Lotus Land, cubbyhole, and pleasure dome. Call it Trance Central station.
The images in Rist’s sixteen-minute video loop remix the colors of Fauvism, the fragmented form of Cubism, and modernism’s juicy jarring nudes. Rist’s quasi-narrative is pleasure, politics, and biology. In an interview she talks to curator Klaus Biesenbach about “our deepest craving to be synchronized with others” and “our love for fluids and water.” To some, Rist’s MoMA installation is little more than a hippy-dippy decorative circus. That’s a mistake, ignoring how clever and subversive Rist is. One subplot of her MoMA installation is to metaphysically induce a rush of psychic estrogen in the museum. By the film’s end the atrium is awash in a tidal sea of crimson and burgundy fluid.
At various points, a pig gnaws an apple, toes squish fruit, giant strawberries drift in clear liquid, a naked girl crawls in the grass. All hips, hair, and breasts, she caresses two earthworms as if removing the sin from Eve’s apple or stroking living phalluses. She fills another person’s mouth and nostrils with flower petals, eats tulips, digs into the dirt with her fingers. She is some sort of otherworldly Earth mother performing a modern-day fertility rite. MoMA seems to swell and stir to new life. A giant eye opens, a naked woman floats upside down, a trail of blood begins running up her breasts. Finally, a colossal female in a white bathing suit rises from the water. Between her legs is a flow of blood. The whole atrium goes red. MoMA comes of age.
What Richard Serra is to hard and dry, Rist is to soft and moist. Rather than only privileging the eye, as in Courbet’s yummy yoni shot The Origin of the World, Rist’s art is a full-body experience. Like Matthew Barney, who crawls like a symbiotic organism through space, or Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely's giant reclining nude that was entered between the legs, Rist wants to turn the museum into an ecstasy machine.
In the West, however, ecstasy comes with proscriptions. Especially if it’s too female—then it’s taboo. A widely circulated rumor has it that MoMA asked Rist to edit out the red between the legs. It turns out that so-called “belly-magic” is more off-limits than mind-magic. In classical terms, the Dionysian is still more fraught than the Apollonian. Thinking about this installation without the blood is like thinking about life without blood.
THE ART REVIEW
MoMA’s Sex Change
The museum’s Pipilotti Rist show cheekily feminizes a bastion of masculinity.
By Jerry Saltz Published Dec 28, 2008
(Photo: Frederick Charles/Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Installation of Piplotti Rist's "Pour Your Body Out" Courtesy of the Artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, London )
The deliciously named Swiss miss Pipilotti Rist, who for two decades has been ravishing viewers with her fiesta-colored video visions, has risen to new heights of trippy bliss. Her opulently beautiful 25-by-200-foot wraparound video at MoMA—complete with two round breast-shaped projector pods protruding from the walls and close-ups of pink tulips, a black pig, and a fleshy nude—is catnip for the eye and a hormonal rush for an institution badly in need of one. It is one of the most seductively rebellious artistic gestures since Lynda Benglis’s notorious Artforum ad in 1974, for which she posed naked wielding a dildo. Benglis’s action slapped a biased art world awake; Rist’s Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) suspends us in a primordial sea of liquids, and performs a metaphysical sex change on the Museum of Modern Art. The atrium of this bastion of masculinism becomes a womb, and the museum itself a woman. In an abstract way, Rist makes the institution ovulate.
Rist’s installation is an impregnation and an incantation. It is also an exorcism. As I’ve said in these pages before, MoMA is—even with this show and the current Marlene Dumas survey—a place where very little work by women is on view, at least in the permanent collection. Rist’s installation comments on and reacts to this misogyny. She has hung magenta-colored draperies almost to the ceiling of the atrium, making it a ballroom, a Hopper movie theater, a bordello, or a living room. Her monolithic projected images caress and dissolve the hard-edged architecture. Drowsy droning music plays; bells ting-a-ling. The atrium has been carpeted, and a large circular couch with a hole in the middle has replaced Barnett Newman’s phallic Broken Obelisk. Shoes and coats are everywhere. People lie around, lean on walls, sleep, and sprawl in groups on the floor and couch. On one of my visits, the well-known painter Gary Stephan drifted by and said, “I wish I had some ganja.” This is museum as hallucination, opium den, Lotus Land, cubbyhole, and pleasure dome. Call it Trance Central station.
The images in Rist’s sixteen-minute video loop remix the colors of Fauvism, the fragmented form of Cubism, and modernism’s juicy jarring nudes. Rist’s quasi-narrative is pleasure, politics, and biology. In an interview she talks to curator Klaus Biesenbach about “our deepest craving to be synchronized with others” and “our love for fluids and water.” To some, Rist’s MoMA installation is little more than a hippy-dippy decorative circus. That’s a mistake, ignoring how clever and subversive Rist is. One subplot of her MoMA installation is to metaphysically induce a rush of psychic estrogen in the museum. By the film’s end the atrium is awash in a tidal sea of crimson and burgundy fluid.
At various points, a pig gnaws an apple, toes squish fruit, giant strawberries drift in clear liquid, a naked girl crawls in the grass. All hips, hair, and breasts, she caresses two earthworms as if removing the sin from Eve’s apple or stroking living phalluses. She fills another person’s mouth and nostrils with flower petals, eats tulips, digs into the dirt with her fingers. She is some sort of otherworldly Earth mother performing a modern-day fertility rite. MoMA seems to swell and stir to new life. A giant eye opens, a naked woman floats upside down, a trail of blood begins running up her breasts. Finally, a colossal female in a white bathing suit rises from the water. Between her legs is a flow of blood. The whole atrium goes red. MoMA comes of age.
What Richard Serra is to hard and dry, Rist is to soft and moist. Rather than only privileging the eye, as in Courbet’s yummy yoni shot The Origin of the World, Rist’s art is a full-body experience. Like Matthew Barney, who crawls like a symbiotic organism through space, or Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely's giant reclining nude that was entered between the legs, Rist wants to turn the museum into an ecstasy machine.
In the West, however, ecstasy comes with proscriptions. Especially if it’s too female—then it’s taboo. A widely circulated rumor has it that MoMA asked Rist to edit out the red between the legs. It turns out that so-called “belly-magic” is more off-limits than mind-magic. In classical terms, the Dionysian is still more fraught than the Apollonian. Thinking about this installation without the blood is like thinking about life without blood.
Monday, 9 February 2009
sophie calle
Sophie Calle "The Blind"
She asks people blind from birth "what their image of beauty" is. The responses range from a painting in which the subject says, "I can feel the three masts and the main sail. I often touch it in the evening." to the chilling response "I don't need beautiful images in my brain . . . since I can't appreciate beauty, I've always run from it." In this work Calle juxtaposes unflattering black and white photographs, text, and color photographs of how she interprets their responses. She draws us into the world of the blind person and asks us how we identify with the response as well as her interpretation of that response.( The Tech online)
starting "the body as a site of culture representation"
Jenny Saville
Marina Abramovic
Imponderabilia
In order to enter the gallery people had to squeeze past and therefore have to choose a side to face to get through. I think I might explore personal space and how people feel uncomfortable in different ways to do with the body.
I like the way her paintings verge on grotesque but are also beautiful. I'm interested in what people think is beautiful and why, and also why people can find something disgusting to look at and some people do not.
Marina Abramovic
Imponderabilia
In order to enter the gallery people had to squeeze past and therefore have to choose a side to face to get through. I think I might explore personal space and how people feel uncomfortable in different ways to do with the body.
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
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