Caitlinland

Sohei Nishino

2011-03-06T10:05:00.001-08:00

Unreal cities: Sohei Nishino's magical photographic maps of London, Tokyo and utopia

Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino's dioramas, painstakingly created from thousands of images, take us all on a journey of the imagination

From Guardian article by Sean O'Hagan 24/2/11:

Last year, Nishino spent a month walking the streets of London – which, come to think of it, does not seem that long a time for the task in hand. He took over 10,000 photographs, which, on his return to Tokyo, he edited down to 4,000. Then the real work began. Having hand-printed the photographs in his own darkroom, Nishino then set about cutting them up and piecing them together – slowly and meticulously – into a giant composite photographic map of the city of London. It measures 7.5ft x 4ft, and will be shown at Michael Hoppen alongside his other diorama maps.

In the meticulous assembling of these photomaps, Nishino creates epic artworks that, despite depicting many familiar icons of modernity and post-modernity – the Empire State building, the Gherkin, the Pompidou Centre – look oddly old-fashioned. He creates what look like medieval or renaissance maps of modern cities. In them, everything is familiar yet oddly disjointed, nothing seems quite in scale and, here and there, whole areas are missing or seem crushed or out-of-proportion. Some of his photographs are taken from above, some from far below. Buildings loom and tilt, as does the terrain, and sometimes a segment of put-together sky appears.

2009-09-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

Zilvinas Kempinas

2009-07-26T06:51:00.000-07:00

2009-05-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

Cornelia Parker- The Distance

"I decided to wrap the kiss up with this piece of string to veil it, so that you couldn't see the heads, to withhold this intimate gesture, a temporary installation called "The Distance", the opposite of an embrace. It's about emotional distance (a kiss with a string attached), disrupting idealised image of love."

Christo and Jeanne Claude

2009-05-17T08:54:00.000-07:00

Store Fronts
Using salvaged building elements, Christo began to construct works in New York in 1964 that represented actual store fronts. This body of work emphasized two aspects that would remain central to many of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's projects: architecture and concealment. These "store" façades, many of them full scale and illuminated from within, reference consumer culture. The artist, however, teasingly denied access to the contents by applying cloth or paper to the inside of the windows. The Store Fronts, themselves receptacles of display, also reflect upon the museum and its exhibition practices. By the late 1960s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude had begun to wrap entire museums, thus obscuring those sites of display.

wrapped tree

wrapped coast

gates

The environmental works the pair creates span great distances in populated landscapes, both rural and urban. They are mostly made of fabric, created in the form of a large curtain, wrapped forms (buildings, coastline, a bridge), surrounded islands, large umbrellas, and other forms. They pay all expenses associated with the artworks, including planning, construction, and taking down, partly from the sale of Christo's preliminary drawings, early works from the 1950's and 1960's, and lithographs. They accept no contributions, grants or other financial assistance, preferring to make their aesthetic decisions apart from any influence financial backing might involve. A large group of paid workers is necessary to construct and take down these works, which can extend for great distances. Usually, there are years of planning, and meetings and hearings held by governments and communities, to gain approval for their projects. They wrapped the Reichstag, today the Parliament of Germany in Berlin, and the process of approval took 24 years. Their work is very expressive, of romanticism, whimsy, poetry, and like much contemporary art, is more experiential perhaps than viewing art in a museum (passively) can sometimes be.

Common Errors
Christo and Jeanne-Claude Respond

The most common error is the misunderstanding that the artist is Christo.

• The artist is not Christo.

• The artists are Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Most common errors which have been found in art books, magazines, newspapers and seen on television:

Christo was born in Bulgaria NOT IN SEVEN OTHER COUNTRIES

The Game of Errors: There are six errors in the following published short sentence:

"Christo wrapped some islands in Florida, off the coast of Miami in Key Biscayne with pink plastic."

1.-2. Christo and Jeanne-Claude never wrapped any Islands. They surrounded the islands. Most journalists do not understand the difference between wrapping and surrounding even though they should know that the United Kingdom is surrounded by water, it is not wrapped in water.

3. There were eleven islands surrounded, but because in two occasions 2 islands were surrounded together, there was a total of nine configurations on a span of seven miles.

4. Not off the coast. Off the coast would be in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Miami Beach.

5. It was in Biscayne Bay in the heart of the city of Miami, between Miami City and Miami Beach. Key Biscayne is miles away from there.

6. Not plastic - FABRIC, woven polypropylene is a man-made fiber, and is woven. Plastic usually refers to a film, not woven. For instance, women who wear nylon stockings are not wearing plastic stockings.

Error: "Running Fence, in Sonoma, made of parachute material."

1.Sonoma is a town in Northern California miles away from the Running Fence. The temporary work of art was located in Sonoma County and in Marin County (Sonoma and Marin Counties).

2.The nylon fabric of the Running Fence could never be used for parachutes. God forbid that anyone would ever jump with that type of fabric.

Error: "Volunteers"

NEVER on any project Except Jeanne-Claude's mother, everyone who works is paid: normal union wages for specialized professional workers, and just above minimum wage for non-skilled workers. One important exception: for the Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Australia, 1968-69 out of 125 paid workers, eleven architecture students refused to be paid. Three of them became artists after the project and are now well known.
Error: "Christo and Jeanne-Claude are mysterious about their work."

NO. Christo and Jeanne-Claude constantly lecture and answer questions from the audience, in museums, colleges, universities and schools all over the world. It is probable that no other artists lecture as much as they do.

Error: "Mr. Christo"

NO: Christo is his first name and the only one he uses. Jeanne-Claude also uses her first name .However, their son Cyril uses Christo's first name as his legal last name: Cyril Christo, born May 11, 1960, is a published poet.

Error: "Jean-Claude" We also get letters addressed to Mr.and Mrs. Claude

No: Jeanne-Claude. (in French Jean-Claude is a man's name.) Some people think that our Last name is Claude. (because of Christo and Jeanne-Claude)

Error: "Christo always sold his work at high price."

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are their own art dealers, they sell Christo's works to Art Collectors, Museums, Galleries and Art Dealers. In 1958, the price of Christo's works varied, according to size, between $40 and $100. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were happy with such prices, because their rent in Paris was $70 a month. To supplement the non-sales of his art, between 1956 and 1964 Christo, in addition to washing cars in garages and dishes in restaurants, had to paint portraits, oil on canvas, which he signed by his family name: Javacheff. Those were highly paid $200 to $300 each. That is how they could survive. That is also how he met Jeanne-Claude, in Paris in 1958, when he painted the portrait of Jeanne-Claude's mother. By the time Christo had done an impressionist portrait, a classical portrait and a cubist portrait of the mother, Christo and Jeanne-Claude were in love...

Error: "Conceptual Artists"

No – a conception on a paper is not Christo and Jeanne-Claude's idea of art. They want to build their projects – they could save a lot of money by not building them, by just keeping them on paper – as conceptual artists do. Christo and Jeanne-Claude want to SEE their project realized because they believe it will be a work of art of joy and beauty. The only way to see it is to build it.

Environmental Artist: Yes – because they created many works in Cities – in Urban environments – and also in Rural Environments but NEVER in deserted places, and always sites already prepared and used by people, managed by human beings for human beings. Therefore they are not "Land Art" either.

We believe that labels are important, but mostly for bottles of wine.

Error: "The easy life of an artist"

Not quite so. Until 2006 Christo was working an average of 17 hours a day – 7 days a week. These days, he works and average of 13 hours a day. Jeanne-Claude is a bit lazier, only 10 hours a day.

They do not take vacations.

So-Called Environmentalists, in the past, have claimed, before each project, that Christo and Jeanne-Claude will hurt the environment. They realized, after the completion that:

1. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are the cleanest artists in the world, all is removed, their large scale works of art are temporary.

2. The sites are restored to their original condition and most materials are recycled. Except in Florida, for the Surrounded Islands. That site was luckily not restored to its original condition. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's workers removed, before the project, at Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s expense, 40 tons of garbage from the eleven Islands (one of the islands was called "beer cans island" – of course the garbage was not restored to the Islands!

3. The Real Environmentalists such as "The Audubon Society" and "The Sierra Club" usually find themselves on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s side – because they are better informed. They know how much Christo and Jeanne-Claude spend to make the public aware of the environment, through the art work, much more than Environmentalists can afford to do.

Error: "See the art work best by flying."

No! None of their work is designed for the birds, all have a scale to be enjoyed by human beings who are on the ground.

2009-05-15T01:41:00.000-07:00

Ann Hamilton

2009-05-14T02:22:00.000-07:00

burning man white fabric sculpture

2009-05-14T02:19:00.000-07:00

Artists : Dan Havel and Dean Ruck

2009-05-14T02:16:00.000-07:00

Anish Kapoor

Short description of the project Fabric sculpture spans 135m between supports. Surface area of 3500m2 and was fabricated into a single piece. The surface curvatures required by the artist were much more extreme than conventional membrane constructions.
Misc. project details
References Techniques & Architecture février-mars 2003
Duration of use
Temporary or permanent structure Temporary
Material of the cover
Cable-net/Textile/Hybrid/Foil Fabric
Type (code) II
Material Fabric/Foil Polyester
Material coating PVC
Main dimensions and form
Covered surface (m2) 3500
Total length (m) 135
Total width (m) 28
Maximum height (m) 28
Maximum free span (m) 135
Form of entire structure Anticlastic

2009-05-14T02:15:00.000-07:00

Venice Biennale 2008
Year of Completion: 2008
Architect/Designer: Gustafson Porter

When landscape architects Gustafson Porter conceived the idea for their Venice Biennale installation it was designed to “respond to the challenge of how to cultivate one’s garden, or how to tend to our affairs”. Exploring the themes of memory, nourishment and enlightenment, they wanted to introduce a fabric sculpture as the centre piece for the garden.

As fabric specialists and a company who loves to take on the more unusual projects Architen Landrell undertook the manufacture and installation of the fabric sculpture. Intended as an area of contemplation, the space has white cushions strewn around it as the swathes of fabric waft above.

While an idyllic vision, it was not an easy task to create the ephemeral fabric clouds. Using several helium weather balloons, the fabric was lifted into the air and the balloons tethered to the ground, the idea being that the sculpture could be seen from the gardens entrance and from various points within the city. According to one journalist the fabric feature formed ‘an exquisitely lovely floating white canopy of spinnaker fabric, supported by tethered white balloons’.

Installation of the structure was in a derelict garden area of post industrial military usage. The garden was reclaimed and landscaped with berms to produce a sculptured, lawned area over which the ethereal clouds were flown. Due to Venice’s archeological and historical rules only shallow ground anchors of the helical type could be used to anchor the balloons and sculpture. These had to be installed by hand within the existing vegetation in order to create as little disruption as possible. Additionally, in order to minimise the visual impact of the rigging for the balloons, 3mm dyneema line with a dark sheathing was used.

The fast track programme of this project made an exciting challenge for the team. Design approval to completion on site was achieved in just 7 days ready for the grand opening of the Biennale!

Declared by critics as ‘a triumph’, ‘enchanting’ and as the festival piece which blew everything else away, the installation was an undoubted success and one which we are extremely proud of.

2009-05-06T08:22:00.001-07:00

'Tunnel' links New York to London (Friday, 23 May 2008)

By Matthew Price
BBC News, New York

People in New York see as far as London

It was possibly the most laborious and least informative interview ever conducted.

It took about five minutes, yielded a one-word answer, and gave little real flavour of the subject.

Still - it was conducted using two whiteboards, two marker pens, and it was done over a distance of 3,471 miles (5,585 km).

How? Well there are two answers to that.

If you believe artist and inventor Paul St George then his "Telectroscope" connects New York and London via a (very) long tunnel running through the earth's crust, with the images bouncing back and forth using mirrors.

The other explanation is that it is all done by optical fibres - take your pick.

One end of the "tunnel" emerges next to Tower Bridge on the banks of the Thames in London - the other is next to Brooklyn Bridge on the banks of New York's East River.

It looks like something HG Wells might have imagined.

Each end has a giant telescope-like construction which appears to punch its way out of the earth.

There are dials, and levers, and thermometer gauges on the side of the 20m long brass and wood construction.

Peer into it and you can see people on the other side of the Atlantic.

Wave at them, they wave back at you.

Write on the whiteboard, and ask a question, and they will write back.

Mesmerising

It is rather like using a giant web-cam, live streaming (though we are told the internet is not involved and there is no audio connection) between two of the world's biggest cities.

So now you know why the following interview took so long.

Once you have got the whiteboard, and written your message on it, you have to angle it correctly so they can read it over in Europe.

"What is your name?" I wrote.

The stranger at the other end, standing in front of Tower Bridge and surrounded by onlookers, picked up his marker and replied.

"Mik," came back the answer, once he had angled his board correctly.

"Where are you from?"

It is a piece of art, and it's also a sort of curiosity in a public space
Peter Coleman
New York organiser

"Bangladesh."

"What do you think of this?" I asked. (Top journalism, huh?)

"GREAT!" came the reply.

Told you it was informative.

Still it is kind of addictive and mesmerising, which strikes me as strange in a world in which we type, text, and Twitter every day, within seconds, to individuals on the other side of the planet without even thinking about it.

Peter Coleman is the producer for the New York end of the project.

"It is a piece of art, and it's also a sort of curiosity in a public space. London and New York are cities with millions of people.

"They can't believe that those are actually people in another city looking at them. That's what I find all these people are sort of amazed at. It pulls you right into it."

English sarcasm

A group of children from California now cluster round the "Telectroscope" - waving and writing messages to the London end.

"That's so cool - they can see us!" one says as they get a wave back from Tower Bridge.

"They're like way over there, and you're sort of talking to them. This is so much fun!"

A New York policeman stands in front with a message. A man at the other end writes something down.

"How's the band?"

"I'm with the NYPD, not the group The Police," the copper writes back.

English sarcasm clearly does not work down a tunnel.

A New York football fan who presumably supports the English club Chelsea steps up: "Man U. Suck!" he writes.

The view through the "Telectroscope"
Tunnel vision - the view of London from New York

The people in London look perplexed, and a little annoyed to be frank - until someone points out that perhaps to them it reads: "Man, you suck."

Then everyone gets very excited.

There are two women at the London end who are from New York City - they are writing where exactly they come from.

They hold up their sign.

"Bay Ridge Brooklyn, yer, go Bay Ridge!!" the New York crowd shout, and for a moment, two groups of strangers, in two cities thousands of miles apart, jump up and down and smile at one another.

2009-04-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

Frieze Magazine

Tunnel Vision

Informant

A new exhibition about New York’s underground earth works reveals a quasi-mythological mirror image of the city
image

Workers are lowered into the Tunnel Boring Machine Launch Area, 26th Street and 11th Avenue, New York (2008)

‘Stocks Dive’, ‘Prices Plunge’, ‘Markets Plummet’. We’re in the midst of a declension, an Icarean moment in time when aspirations turn vertiginous and ladders become snakes. A new exhibition in New York suggests that perhaps there is some kind of life beneath the cold asphalt rushing up to meet us. ‘The Future Beneath Us’, currently on show at the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex, and at the Science, Business and Industry Library, speaks of a mirror city to New York, a benighted, unglamorous metropolis of dark shafts and damp thoroughfares in which air is hewn out of rock, rather than rock heaped into air. It paints this portrait quite accidentally while describing the eight massive subterranean construction projects currently taking place deep beneath the city’s surface.

The simultaneous creation of a thicket of tunnels, hubs and work plants has seemingly resulted in an alter-city being formed, a sunless empire hidden entirely from the view of most of the city’s denizens. Chief among the projects is the gargantuan Water Tunnel No. 3, one of the largest engineering projects in the world. It has a diameter of seven metres, stretches for almost 100 kilometres, and reaches depths beneath the city of over 250 metres, as deep as the Chrysler building is high. It is a work of monumental size and beauty, a gargantuan concrete tube laid down amidst a glistening backdrop of quartzofeldspathically-banded garnetiferous muscovite-biotite schist. The only shame is that it will never be seen. Its entombment is part of its creation. It is a true earth work.

Such colossal underground structures have traditionally been the domain of morlocks and mole people, both antitheses of civilization and its warped reflection. Here too in New York there is something of this. The tunnels are created by ravenous giant leech-like boring machines with ever-spinning circular jaws, which are, in turn, operated by thick-skinned workers known as sandhogs. Compounding the feeling of a subculture beneath the substrata is the fact that many of the sandhogs are second or third generation tunnel workers, their forefathers having worked, and sometimes died, on Water Tunnels Nos. 1 and 2. A popular sandhog saying, ‘If it’s deeper than the grave, the sandhogs dug it’, further stresses the quasi-mythological elements of this underworld: for what is deeper than the grave but Hades itself? It comes as little surprise that the robotic submarine used to explore the city’s existing water tunnels is known as Persephone.

Not that such a ghastly reading of the project is anywhere present in what is a strictly civic exhibition. With a beady eye on the vast stimulus packages set to be thrown at public works across the country, the show seemed more interested in attempting to instill its subjects with a whiff of New Deal human triumphalism. In this it appears a little misguided. The time-span allotted to these projects is less human than geological in nature. Work on Water Tunnel No. 3 began in 1969 and is not expected to finish until 2020. The Second Avenue Subway was first proposed in 1920, and has been under construction since 1972. The Croton Water Filtration Plant has been mooted since 1890. If any kind of memorial to the human spirit is being created beneath the city proper it is not a triumph of the common man over economic adversity but rather a fossil kingdom of public policy.

Indeed while the utility of these works is unquestionable, history would suggest that not even usefulness is a necessary feature for the creation of triumphant public works. Take the story of Joseph Williamson, a tobacco merchant from Liverpool, who, in the early 19th century, began employing hundreds of workers in the Edge Hill area of the city to build a series of secret subterranean passages and huge underground halls beneath the streets. In the words of Charles Hand, President of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, and a fairly early (1916) explorer of Williamson’s creation, the construction was: ‘a nightmare maze of constructed tunnels and caves. Nobody knows their extent. They are grotesque beyond description … dungeons carved out of the solid rock with no light and no ventilation … all apparently without the slightest objective or motive.’

The reasons for the creation of Williamson’s tunnels have been much debated. Some suggest that he was a member of an extremist religious sect and that the tunnels were built to provide refuge for himself and his friends come the Day of Judgment. Others propose they were used to smuggle contraband to and from Liverpool’s port. Yet amidst all the conspiratorial chatter, Williamson’s insistence that he had them built purely for ‘the employment of the poor’ rings truest. Over 130 years before the New Deal and its mass employment programmes sought to revivify a country, Williamson instigated a one-man philanthropic Works Progress Administration, making sure his workers ‘all received a weekly wage and were thus enabled to enjoy the blessing of charity without the attendant curse of stifled self-respect’. Unbounded by usefulness, created purely to relieve unemployment, his tunnels are the epitome of an economic stimulus, suggesting that during dark times, to seek the light at the end of the tunnel, you first need to build one.

George Pendle

George Pendle is an author and journalist living in New York.

2009-04-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

2009-04-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

2009-04-27T11:45:00.000-07:00

Robert Morris

2009-04-15T13:30:00.000-07:00

2009-04-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

Joseph Beuys (pictures I took from Centre Pompidou)

Exhibitions I wandered into in London

2009-04-09T03:24:00.000-07:00

Haunch Of Venison: Mythologies

Rebecca Warren at Serpentine Gallery

Annette Messager: The Messengers (Hayward Gallery)

Highlights (for me) were:

"Inflated, Deflated" and "Articulated-Disarticulated" (Annette Messager)
Untitled (Three part High-relief Construction) by Fred Sandback
"Continuous profile (Head of Mussolini) by Renato Giuseppe

Christo

2009-03-28T09:20:00.001-07:00

Christo and Jeanne Claude

Although their work is visually impressive and often controversial as a result of its scale, the artists have repeatedly denied that their projects contain any deeper meaning than their immediate aesthetic. The purpose of their art, they contend, is simply to create works of art or joy and beauty and to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes.

Karla Black

2009-03-17T15:02:00.000-07:00

Karla Black

www.westlondonprojects.org...

"Generally, the sculptures are rooted in Kleinian Psychoanalysis and Feminism; in theories about the violent and sexual underpinnings of both individual mental mess, as in neuroses and psychosis, and the formlessness of specific points in art history, i.e. German and Abstract Expressionism, Viennese Actionism, Land Art, Anti-form and Feminist Performance.

Materials that are formless even in their functions, like medicines for minor ailments, household cleaners, toiletries and make-up are used along with plaster, chalk, paper and paint, which have the capacity to be structural and are transformative in intention.

Essentially, these configurations are made from mess or formless matter (that which is in a ‘pre-object’ type state), and from waste or used materials (that which is left ‘post-object’), as well as from straightforward art store supplies. None of the work is purely gestural, since there is obvious aesthetic intent. The finished things are almost objects, or only just objects. While nearly being performances, installations or paintings, the works actually retain a large amount of the autonomy of modernist sculpture. This is because sculpture is real. It is completely in the world, and therefore has the capacity at least to attempt to withhold the offer of travel elsewhere through an imaginary optical/cerebral escape. Since it is actually here, perhaps it is here to help.

Part of the disparate thinking within this exhibition is that happiness is to be had from an immersion in the physical world, from moments of fascination or absorbtion, when self-consciousness is lost and we be and do purely for the sake of it rather than imagining what we might look like to others. Another thought is that there are certain truths at the base of relationships between people, however deep down, that are undisputed. Everything else is just surface. All of the separate works here are caught between thoughtless gestures and seriously obsessive attempts at beauty. Editing is an idea that is prevalent. Deleting words once said or written, like erasing material evidence of deeds done, is a civilising procedure. Editing does the same job as attempts to cover up or prettify our physical selves. Both create a necessary distance from where we are unable to pick out that which is unpalatable. I do not see such screening as negative, but rather as a necessary and positive stance to avoid some unpleasant behaviours and events that can result from revealing too much or failing to establish boundaries. A complete whitewash, however, is almost never possible."

Ludwika Ogorzelec

2009-03-17T14:51:00.001-07:00

Ludwika Ogorzelec

weighed down by...

2009-03-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

2009-03-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

2009-03-04T10:23:00.000-08:00

experiments in studio

2009-02-28T05:40:00.000-08:00

memories

2009-02-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

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...

claustrophobia

2009-02-21T09:13:00.001-08:00

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]

sweating

2009-02-21T09:10:00.000-08:00

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]

2009-02-21T09:05:00.000-08:00

don't eat with your mouth open

2009-02-21T09:03:00.000-08:00

skin

2009-02-21T08:47:00.002-08:00

memory

2009-02-21T08:44:00.000-08:00

tony oursler

2009-02-18T07:19:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-12T15:27:00.000-08:00

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.

sophie calle

2009-02-09T10:02:00.000-08:00

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"

2009-02-09T09:31:00.001-08:00

Jenny Saville

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.

2009-02-03T13:56:00.001-08:00

Jeremy Deller

knit

2009-01-28T13:10:00.000-08:00

Guerilla Knitting (not me)

Matie Trewe

adventure

2009-01-27T08:26:00.000-08:00

Donald Duck

2009-01-27T08:14:00.000-08:00

Here’s the classic Donald Duck of Tony Strobl

by Anders Berglund

"Secret Of The Sargasso Sea" (Donald Duck 72). From the Swedish
edition published in 1961. © Walt Disney Prod.

DO YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW who drew the most pages of Disney comics over the years? A good guess would be Tony Strobl. If you were a reader of Donald Duck sometime between 1955 and the late 1970s you no doubt recognize his comics. His simple, clear style, restrained tempo and usually clever intrigue, made his comics appreciated by many. In short, his name is one of those that deserves to be brought out from behind the shadows of the giant trademark of Walt Disney.

Kiki Smith

2009-01-27T07:41:00.000-08:00

Kiki Smith

Sirens and Harpies

Whitney Biennial in Central Park

"Following Wien Walk north to the entrance of the Central Park Wildlife Center, parkgoers will be greeted by twenty bronze sculptures by Kiki Smith, each one bearing the head of a woman and the body of a bird. Sirens and Harpies, based upon the deadly temptresses and voracious monsters of Greek mythology, will be sited at the gateway to the zoo. The Harpies-ranging in size from 2 ½ to 4 feet tall-will peer down at passersby from each of three pillars at the zoo's entrance. The pillars will be flanked by large granite boulders, upon which two flocks of smaller Sirens will perch, guarding the entrance at ground level. These disarming creatures, extracted from an ancient past and thrust into the present, will be both stoic gatekeepers and fantastical reminders of the possibility of a menagerie more magical than the familiar animals inside the zoo." (Public Art fund and Whitney Museum of American Art)

sketches and pictures from charles avery

2009-01-26T04:02:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking of making 3 headless ducks at the moment...

Today I am mainly...

2009-01-19T10:28:00.000-08:00

..trying to concentrate on animals and how I see people as animals (ponyman, pigman)

cartoons
animal stories
noises
people making noises
"you pig!" "she looks like a horse"
miniature

looking at some Matthew Barney,

and

Mark Wallinger

also want to go and see this exhibition sometime this week at the Scottish National Gallery of Moden Art

that is all.

Where to begin

2009-01-18T14:35:00.000-08:00

This project Site-Place-Context on the Mackintosh building to me seemed like hell because I still don't feel very comfortable here but then I was thinking maybe it will help me start to. So I was thinking maybe of trying to make myself feel more at home here by having a home from home kind of a theme. However, I'm also interested in the fact that there used to be a "living animal room" here where the shop is now. I wish we had animals in the building now...

Caitlinland

Sohei Nishino

Zilvinas Kempinas

Christo and Jeanne Claude

Robert Morris

Exhibitions I wandered into in London

Christo

Karla Black

Ludwika Ogorzelec

memories

claustrophobia

sweating

don't eat with your mouth open

skin

memory

tony oursler

sophie calle

starting "the body as a site of culture representation"

knit

adventure

Donald Duck

Kiki Smith

sketches and pictures from charles avery

Archive

Today I am mainly...

Where to begin