Art

A few years ago, after we had first created the fictional world of XPT, my brother (who’s a lot more familiar with the art world than I was then or now) alerted me to Finnish artist Alvar Gullichsen’s Bonk Business Inc. > …a multiglobal industrial enterprise at the forefront of 3rd millennium technologies. The company is the world leader in fully Defunctioned Machinery, Cosmic Therapy applications, Advanced Disinformation Systems (ADS), Repacked consumer products and LBH (Localized Black Hole) technology.

I’m not really a big fan of custom desktop backgrounds, generally prefering to stick with the default ‘Aqua Graphite’ image that I’m used to, but if I was, one of John Maeda’s food images would be my first choice. Perhaps this Damien Hirst’s shark-in-the-tank influenced “geometrical paradise of dried anchovies”:

It’s that time again: Copeland Borough Council presents The World’s Biggest Liar Competition, held annually at The Bridge Inn, Santon Bridge, Cumbria. This years contest will take place on Thursday, 20th November. In 2000, Tim and I took part in a Festival of Lying organised around the competition by artists Anna Best, Karen Guthrie, Nina Pope and Simon Poulter. Other speakers included crop circle maker Rob Irving, magician Peter Lamont, author Jon Ronson and Elvis.

These guys have been working together since 1979, and in 1987 made a film called Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) the inspiration behind Honda’s recent Cog TV advert. Watch the trailer for The Way Things Go and be amazed. (I’m reminded of Mehdi Norowzian’s film Joy which was the starting point for Guinness’s Anticipation, a hugely popular advert we at NoHo Digital turned into a hugely popular screensaver.

Jason Salavon’s work is just sublime. Especially his visualizations of “statistical data tracking the US domestic production of shoes and slippers from 1960-1998 in 31 categories”. And the nudes (he should enter these for Miss Digital World). Update: Inspired by Jason’s work, Flickr member brevity (Neil Kandalgaonkar) has written an app “to blend Flickr images which share the same tags”.

At the Damien Hirst show I was struck most by perhaps the smallest and least conspicuous piece in the exhibition, a small ‘pills and dead flies’ canvas in White Cube’s reception. I think this demonstrates what I like most about Damien’s work, the economy of some of his ideas – I mean what two small objects of more or less the same size could be more different than a perfectly-formed white pill and a dead fly?

Tim has been thinking about creative partnerships again, after we joined the crowds at the Hirst show at White Cube yesterday. I followed this up today by going to see Candice Breitz’s video installations at Modern Art Oxford. One piece in particular struck a chord: Double Karen (Close to You) 2000 which samples video of Karen Carpenter singing a stripped down version of (They Long To Be) Close to You. One of a series of ‘duets’ (the others feature Olivia Newton-John, Annie Lennox and Whitney Houston), the work consists of two identical monitors facing each other over a stairwell, showing one Karen singing only the words “me-me-me” to the other Karen who sings “you-you-you” in reply.

Jim Bengston, my uncle, has a new show. Most of these images are from the three months of any year Jim spends traveling the US in his Airstream (he’s originally from Illinois, but has lived in Oslo since the 70s) but there are a few from times and places I recognise, like the one from New Years Eve in Berlin (we all climbed the Teufelsberg, a hill made from all the rubble left in the city after WW2).