bloggy

Anonymous Postcard

Art

Anonymous Postcard is a new project of Tucker Nichols and Dakin Hart. Their description:

Anonymous Postcard is designed to allow anyone to openly communicate to a third party without the complications of personal contact. After being vetted by our staff of experts, a claim found to reflect the civic spirit of the project will be transformed into a vague and largely indecipherable postcard and mailed toward the intended recipient.

This is my favorite one so far:

WIFFFDIPTYCH-full.jpg

To: Liz Pate of Greenwich, Ct
Claim: She was recently quoted in a New York Times article in which she opposed a Wiffleball field some local teenagers had built in a vacant lot. I thought the teenagers should be commended for doing something positive and I love Wiffleball. I happen to have an excellent slider with a Wiffleball which most hitters find untouchable.

See the archives for more.

Long Island drug dealers are X-Men fans

Image

Check out the photo from Newsday of a weapon recovered in a drug bust on Long Island.

coke-bust-wolverine.jpg

Suffolk County District Attorney, Thomas Spota, shows one of weapons that was confiscated during a cocaine drug bust in Riverhead, at his office at Riverhead Criminal Court (Photo by James Carbone, Newsday / July 29, 2008)

Dan Cameron on Nancy Hwang

nancy-hwang-freeshow.jpg

Documentation of Nancy Hwang’s participation in Free Show, September 2007

This essay related to Nancy’s February 2008 show at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City is the best thing I’ve ever read about her work. James and I are big fans, and really enjoyed reading it. We met her at the bar mentioned in the first paragraph, but she let us have two stools so we could be there together.

A lot of important art starts off as a rumor. Nancy Hwang’s career offers the example of an artist whom many people actually haven’t heard of, but when you describe a couple of her pieces to them, they suddenly realize they have heard about it before, or at least they think they have. However, because no new objects come into being in the process of Hwang’s art, it somehow seems less necessary to pinpoint the precise identity of the artist who created the bar with a single stool, or set up the manicurist station where one’s hands are worked on by somebody whose face one never sees. In fact, people who have never experienced her work directly sometimes feel free to embellish what they do know about it with small details of their own. By operating so explicitly outside the conventional boundaries of what constitutes artistic practice, Nancy Hwang now has an entire genre practically all to herself: the artist who creates the piece by being herself in a specified place and time, and who leaves people talking about her after she’s gone.

Linkage - art and politics edition

Art

a1one in Tehran

A1one: mural on the Tehran-Karaj Expressway, Tehran 2007 (image courtesy www.kolahstudio.com)

  • Hrag Vartanian has a terrific interview with Iranian street artist A1one on the ArtCal Zine
  • The New York Review of Books has just republished Norman Mailer’s coverage of the 1968 party conventions for Esquire. I have only ever read “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” from these writings.

Bonus image from sent by, not by Jay Blotcher, of Jay Boy Greetings:

jay blotcher gop