The Preserve Toothbrush
This is a post about a toothbrush. It doesn't have batteries or some sort of built in toothpaste dispenser. What it does have is free postage so it can be disposed of in an environmentally better way.
How often do we get a new toothbrush (plastic) and toss the packaging (plastic) and the old one (plastic) in the trash (landfill)? The Preserve Toothbrush eliminates the waste in all of those steps.
- The brush is made from recycled yogurt cups
- The package is a pre-paid mailer for your old brush
- That gets shipped back to Preserve to get recycled.
Ideas and products like this make a difference for our environment. How big?
Who is that standing on in the field?
The sun is coming up a image of a man appears, who is it, he's not moving. I walk towards the man as I get closer I see the man is deformed, his arms are so long they touch the earth at his feet. He is looking slightly down, bit sad I think.
Blame Yoko
As a younger man I really didn't have much of an appreciation for modern or contemporary art. It didn't really click - I didn't understand it - It didn't make sense. Hence, I didn't really like it. Then one Saturday my girlfriend convinced me to go the SF Moma to check out the Yoko Ono exhibit. "The bitch that broke up the Beatles?" I asked. "Yes" she replied.
To be quite honest I probably wouldn't have gone if it had been some artist whose name I didn't recognize somehow. I figured why not, let's see why kind of voodoo magic this woman had in order to cast her spell on the iconic John Lennon. There were 3 distinct things I remember:
1) A random pile of small bricks encompassed by a circle in one room then a larger pile of random bricks encompassed by a circle in another room. People walking the exhibit would randomly pick up bricks and move them from one pile to another. Oddly enough I felt compelled to do the same thing. So I did.
2) A film loop of a fly landing on someone's skin then of a fly landing on someone's nipple. It just looped over and over again. Yet I sat there for at least 10 minutes watching the loop because I kept waiting or expecting or anticipating for something to happen. Nothing ever did.
3) A film of Yoko putting strips of paper with Japanese writing on them into glass bottles and then throwing the bottles off the top of a building. The strips of paper and shards of glass were now on display on the wall next to the video monitor. I examined each piece of Japanese writing even though I couldn't make heads or tails of any them. (I did study Japanese every day for 3 months one summer in High School)
The exhibit left me shaking my head and thinking WTF? I didn't have an appreciation for modern art but I always had/have an appreciation for WTF? If something during the course of the day leaves you shaking your head saying WTF, you are probably having a pretty interesting day. It was at that point I realized that this exhibit wasn't about understanding anything. It was about experiencing something - having an emotional expression or reaction to something. I got it! Fucking Yoko!
So now I try to check out as much modern art as possible.
Since I live in Zurich and most people don't really know many Swiss artists, I want to spread the word on two reknowned Swiss (Zurich) artists Peter Fischli & David Weiss. They work in various mediums: multi-media, film & photography, and sculptures made out of interesing materials such as sausage (Swiss people love sausage), charcuterie, and clay. Their collection of small clay sculptures made me laugh hysterically. "Pythagoras discovering his own theorem" made me cry because of the look on his face - hilarious! The inner engineer in me also appreciates some of the Rube Goldbergesque installations because they blow things up. That's always fun.
They have some work at the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim; however, they are represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in NYC. I don't know how big of a collection they have but if you get a chance to see their small collection of work, you should do it.
Clay Sculptures
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective
Francis Bacon (British, 1909–1992) Portrait of Michel Leiris
The first major exhibition in New York in twenty years devoted to one of the most important painters of the twentieth-century, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective features 130 works (65 paintings and 65 archival items) that span the entirety of the artist’s full and celebrated career. The landmark exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, which mark the centenary of the artist’s birth in Dublin in 1909, bring together the most significant works from each period of Bacon’s career, focusing on the key subjects and themes that run through his extraordinary creative output. This presentation affords the most comprehensive examination to date of Bacon’s sources and working processes, offering a reevaluation of the artist’s work in light of a range of new interpretations and archival materials that have emerged since his death in 1992. The Metropolitan is the sole U.S. venue for this exhibition, which draws from public and private collections around the world.
Accompanied by a catalogue.
The exhibition is made possible in part by The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation and Paula Cussi.
The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate Britain, London, in partnership with the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Big Bambu-Along the Hudson River
Moving Bambu on the Hudson River
Inside the broken down blue metal warehouse that once produced some of the most important bronze sculptures on the east coast, former Tallix foundry is the oddest installation this man has ever seen.
The "Big Bambu" Not Cheech and Chong's Big Bambu although the artist did have the record albumn in the warehouse. The two artist Doug and Mike Starn of starnstudio.com have created a warehouse full of bambu stacked to the ceiling with an archway that invites the viewer to walk into the show and be part of it.
Big Bambu isn't a static installation. It is always moving. It started on one side of the warehouse and is moving to the other, it moves over top of itself. When you walk in you will look and keep looking up because this stack of bambu is 3 stories high and in the mix of bambu poles you will find mountain climbers moving poles from one side to the other.
In September 2008, the Starns took over the former Tallix Foundry in Beacon, New York (50 foot high ceilings by 320-foot long by 65 foot wide), and the construction of Big Bambú immediately started. As of November 15th, more than 2,000 bamboo poles have been assembled creating an extraordinary intricate mental and physical network system
This artwork, in the realm of architecture and performance, starts as a massive tower created from lashed together bamboo poles and brings into space representations of complexity and chaos. At its pinnacle, the continually evolving architecture being built from within (no outside scaffolding or support) will cantilever out as far as the bamboo poles network allows, and then will bridge down to the floor. At this point the first tower will be dismantled pole by pole and carried through the structure and down to create another monumental tower and then on again, walking down the 320 feet space, almost like a Slinky and then back again. Big Bambú will evolve through the continuous rebuilding and rethinking of the structure at all times.
The Starns are directing 8 to 15 rock climbers at a time, who are assembling the structure’s vernacular network in an ongoing action. Big Bambú is consistent with the idea of a self-healing organism; within this “fabric” of bamboo pole network, the artists expect that some poles will stress and fail, but that the structure (the bamboo poles are fibrous and flexible unlike wooden boards that crack and break apart) will maintain some integrity. The tower represents the concepts of self-organization, adaptation and the interconnectedness of all things.
Big Bambú is connotative of an autonomous, spontaneous, self-governing, disorganized network responding to itself to better navigate the environment. “It represents me- in that I am who I was, and, I am completely different than I was when I was a little boy.” Doug Starn writes.
The Starns are currently developing a tentative exhibition project focusing on Big Bambú, with the Detroit Institute of Arts for the fall of 2010, and potential venues in Naples (Italy).
The visuals on this Website will be regularly updated, showing the continuous evolution of the artwork and its evolving incarnation.