Expeditions in limits of all

Art, science and technology have so much in common. There are artist in arctic and Antarctic, to prove that, project of artist Marco Peljhan "Makrolab" (1997-2007) is in it last faze. "Makrolab"
is project of multimedia artist, Peljhan and in realization of institute project atol. We can watch the project from beginning of ten years ago, when it was build and shown for Documenta X in Kassel, to it's final state this year, the final state means it is going to become constant station for artist and scientist to work and create in Antarctic.
Project is flipping between art, science and technology, defined as conceptual artistic work and scientific laboratory, and durable architectural object it is a realized utopy and as well strategic place for reflexing actual global ecological social balance. It is functional living unit, research station for eight people , which is self controlled in energetic meaning. Till now it was build in Europe, Australia, United states(California), Africa(Johannesburg), and it was also in referential world exhibitions of happening in contemporary art, from Documenta, Venice Bienal, Manifesta, and Ars Eletronica. It is designed to research three basic human needs; survive, live, and make point in life.
The project is developed by Atol and I-TASC interpolar, transnational art science constellation,
A project was filmed by Saso Podgorsek movie is so called Atanarjuat and won golden palm in Caness, 2001. Check this link to get more technical and conceptual info on project.

"Merda di artista"

People are frequently asking: What is the most disgusting or horrible thing called "art" that you have seen?
Our mind is worried is use feces and even dead bodies... still art?
let me put it that way, What sells as art must be art.
it is most honest you will ever read and if you ask your self abouth that thessis, ar you still worried it wont stand?

Please don't laugh, but public opinion of most odd piece of art : The most famous "the fountain" by Marchel Duchamp was in fact a urinal that was put on display.
On second place there is "Merda di artista", but people are not even shure, if they know how to call that work correctly, and the would never remember what is name of the artist.

When there is from speaking badly about the contemporary art, punctually it is ended with making I point out to this small scato it of Manzoni. The artist with a simple label has completed a caustic and controversial gesture that, forty years after, continues to animate arguments and manomissioni…
In the 1961 Piero Manzoni inscato it and he exposes the own excrements. There is little from adding. If not that, in spite of the common vulgata one, to hit it is just this disarming semplicita`: one scato it metallic of sealed conserve; a label that, in four languages (Italian, French, English, German), enunciates the content: thirty grams of merda “conserved to the natural one”, like puntigliosamente specified. Pulled in ninety exemplary (of which much today dispersed) like a multiple, everyone of these is sold to the price of the every day quotation the gold (enough this transition in order to establish a relationship with coevo the Yves Klein). But the past year a single piece has been acquired from the Tate Gallery for the sum of 52mila dollars: the excrements are become more precious to you of the gold.
Difficult to go beyond: one scato it has been enough to put in embarrassment formations of historians of the art, than they did not know more what to make itself some of their critical baggage. And when to the artefact - sculpture or object that is seemed to confarsi the more traditional lessico, these ends rovinosamente for being dragged in a gorgo fatal (faecal): how to articulate here, as an example, the relationship between contained shape and? Evidently, the eschatological callback does not make that to hide a thinner device, legacy not only to the fact - of for himself not pacific, but sure not new in the fenomenologia of the art of the nine hundred that I made them they can approach the sphere of the artistic one. Although it is Manzoni to complete the passage to the acte, is from the times of Cézanne that something of the sort - a creation anale- was in the air and already Apollinaire spoke about an Italian artist who around to 1913-14 painted using excrements, like today makes of the rest Chris Ofili.
Piero Manzoni - merda D
The more genuine scandal of the work is in fact that one to make to surrender the spectator to the own blindness and impotence to a visible object that renounces to donate itself totally to the sight (and the olfatto one), for ritrarsi in a permanent invisibilita`. To attest the content, solo enunciating printed on the aesthetic label second the canoni of the own one to packaging of the age and above all the company of the artist on the cover of the box it. The work demands an action of confidence in the power of nominazione of the language, in the testualita` that hides the facies visual that will not never make image. In other words, they are the words of Manzoni, and not its deiezioni, that they make problem. As J.P. Criqui has written, here we have to that to make with one “merda written”. The artistic content is them, to hand capacity, but second hidden modern logic of the smaltimento of the excrements (than lately a esuberante thinker like Žižek for its philosophical implications has interested).
Sure, one via of escape exists: to manomettere a box it and to see what are truly within, placing therefore fine to the unit of the work, to its classic equilibrium between shape and contained like to its gold value of exchange. An unavoidable step: some year it makes an artist French has opened one (as has remembered Denys Riout in a recent conference to the Centre Pompidou, crowded in spite of the ripugnanti images projected during one calm domenicale morning). Unfortunately the photography that testifies the operation is taken from one perspective that - still once! - it does not allow to watch within. In any case, from how much it is said, inside hides one scato it more small confirmed from a wadding layer that prevents them to sballottare. Other boxes them have been quite subordinates to i beams X, examination that would have confirmed the structure to matrioska. For the report, still nobody, up to now, has opened the box it more small: sterile operation, because the attempt of Manzoni was that one to make a work that it spoke about the art and its consumption. In this box in reality it is put it in conserve, in advance payment on the times, all upgrades them of the conceptual art.
But, please, don't worry. first you need to buy it, then to open the can ad see if it is like in the way of your imagination....

Big bubbes and stupid women

Take one look at John Currin's paintings and you could assume he likes stupid women with big tits. Pouting, wide-eyed ingénues look vacantly out of his canvases while ladies in mini-skirts measure each other's immense breasts. There is nothing politically correct here. And yet, on closer inspection, his representation of women isn't so clear-cut.

Currin depicts a bizarre and very American world of ageing divorcees, 70s pin-ups and cliché gay couples. He distils the falsity of TV culture and throws it back in people's faces. Currin wants viewers to feel uncomfortable and enjoy it.

He fuses this very modern approach to his subjects with a kind of classical style which combines the strange, jagged poses and extended bellies of the 16th-century German painter Lucas Cranach, or the hand gestures of Da Vinci, with WASP-ish empty faces. You hate the people he depicts, but you just can't help but love the way they’re depicted.

Richard Prince sexual fantasies and sexual frustrations of middle-class America

A sexual fantasy is a deliberate fantasy or pattern of thought with the goal of creating or enchancing sexual feelings; it is mental imagery that an individual considers to be erotic. These fantasies have great variation in their makeup and purpose: they can be long, drawn-out stories or quick mental flashes of sexual imagery; their purposes range from obvious sexual motivations, such as sexual arousal and reaching orgasm, to simply passing the time or helping a person fall asleep. Sexual fantasies are nearly universally experienced and can be positive, negative, or even both. A person may or may not wish to enact their sexual fantasies in real life; some may find their fantasies completely unacceptable — or even physically impossible — were they to be transposed into real life.
Sexual frustration describes the condition in which a person is in a state of agitation, stress or anxiety due to prolonged sexual inactivity and/or sexual dissatisfaction that leads them to want more sex or better sex, or a state in which he/she is sexually aroused but unable to act on the feeling. The term does not define whether his/her desire is normal or abnormally high; it simply means that his/her arousal is not being met by activity and therefore he/she is experiencing tension as a result.

It is sometimes used to imply that a person has an overactive sex drive (accusatory sense), although more often it implies simply an uncomfortably low level of sexual activity, or some arousing stimulation that is causing frustration (in the sympathetic sense).

Lack of sexual activity is not the only cause of sexual frustration; the condition may also be caused by a lack of a desired activity, such as acting out fantasies or trying new positions. In many cases, sexual frustration leads to compulsive masturbation.

In 1975 Richard Prince began to use photographs in his art work. He collected magazine advertising photographs and created collages, combining them with text. He made a shift in techique in 1977 when he began re-photographing advertising photographs. The image might be re-cropped and enlarged, out of focus, in colour or black and white. These are relatively subtle technical transformations but raise many questions relating to the status and intention of the work.

The re-photographing questions authorship; can we accept Prince as the author of the images even though they are essentially direct appropriations of ready-made images? Do we read the images as adverts, as fine art, a combination of the two or a critique of both? How much emphasis should we place on Prince's choice of images; did he have an emotional response to them; do they reveal aspects of the artist's identity? Image appropriation was particularly dominant in the work of young artists in the late 1970s and 1980s. Artists such as Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine and Sarah Charlesworth, in different ways, deconstructed existing imagery often drawn from commercial graphics to create new discourses for and questionings of fine art practice. It is interesting to note that photography, more than any other medium, was used to exemplify the new art theories in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The Cream Master Barney

Matthew Barney (born March 25, 1967 in San Francisco, California) is a contemporary artist who works with film, video, installations, sculpture, photography, drawing and performance art. Barney has described himself as being primarily a sculptor.[1] New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman called Barney "the most important American artist of his generation." Barney's work has been described as being part of "the legacy of the performance art of the 1960s and 1970s."[2]

Barney spent his youth partially in Idaho, where he played football in Capital High School, and partially in New York City with his mother, who introduced him to art and museums. This intermingling of sports and art would inspire his later work as an artist. Barney entered Yale University planning on studying medicine, but became enamored with art and fashion. He received a B.A. from Yale in 1989. He also worked briefly as a model for Click Modeling Agency, and was in a J. Crew ad.
Barney has had strong positive and negative receptions for his work. Calling his work a "snooze," a film critic for the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl, criticizes Barney as being "a star for attaining stardom.Another critic in the same magazine characterizes elements in Drawing Restraint 9 as "an unabashed display of Oriental kitsch that makes Memoirs of a Geisha look like an ethnographic documentary."Jed Perl has described Barney's work as "phony-baloney mythopoetic movies, accompanied by Dumpster loads of junk from some godforsaken gymnasium of the imagination".

Others have defended his work, comparing Barney to other famous performance artists including Chris Burden and Vito Acconci, and as being simultaneously a critique and celebration of commercialism and blockbuster filmmaking. Regarding the Cremaster series' enigmatic nature, Alexandra Keller and Frazer Ward write:
“ "Rather than reading Cremaster, we are encouraged to consume it as high-end eye candy, whose symbolic system is available to us but hardly necessary to our pleasure: meaning, that is, is no longer a necessary component to art production or reception. Left to its own devices-and it is all devices-Cremaster places us in a framework of mutually assured consumption, consuming us as we consume it." ”

Famed art critic Arthur C. Danto has praised the majority of Barney's work, noting the importance Barney's use of of sign systems such as Mason mythology.

Others have asserted Barney's work are contemporary expressions of surrealism. "Completely arcane, hermetic and solipsistic, they nevertheless periodically provide some of the most enigamatically beautiful experimental film imagery you'll ever see," writes the critic Chris Chang.

"Is Barney's work a new beginning for a new century?," asks Richard Lacayo, writing in Time. "It feels more like a very energetic longing for a beginning, in which all kinds of imagery have been put to the service of one man's intricate fantasy of return to the womb. Something lovely and exasperating is forever in formation there. Will he ever give birth?"

Paradoxes of European Arts and Culture

New Europe - new art.
"Marina Abramovic (Belgrade, 1946) is based in Amsterdam, although she continues to travel all over the world. She has had solo exhibitions and given performances in many countries, including 'Moving Pictures' (2002), in New York's Guggenheim Museum, 'The Hero' (2001), in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington; 'Balkan Baroque' (1997), in the XLVII Venice Biennale; 'Becoming Visible' (1995), in the Istanbul Biennial; 'Dragon Heads' (1993), in La Caixa, Barcelona; Documenta 9, Kassel (1992) and 'Magiciens de la Terre' (1989) in the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris... Throughout her artistic career, Abramovic has tested the physical and mental limits of the human body. She was one of the pioneers in performances in the 1970s, and has said that performances enabled her to leap to other spaces and dimensions. They also allowed her to explore her body in public, upsetting social codes, and to adopt strategies that destroy myths about what is female, the body, its representation and identity."
I find it easy to illustrate and explain this thesis with facts. And with any discortions. Arts is a phenomenon determened by its time and place and the particular conditions unfolding there. Why, another speaker might instead enumarate quite different facts of artistic life. Facts that would cause neither joy, nor the impression, that the situation of arts in changing. Europe has essentially improved. Let say, we can find a notice that a book of poetry, published in Europe, runs on overage two or three hundred coppies only, while in Soviet times the smallest number of copies for a such a book was six or seven thousand.
Those of you who read the Times or J's Theater (Hi John!) or just keep up on these things have caught that Marina Abramovic is doing Seven Easy Pieces this week at the Guggenheim in New York. Six are restaged well known performance works by Abramovic and others. One -- "Entering the Other Side" -- is created specifically for this exhibition.
Last Thursday night, we went to see Abramovic's restaging of the Vito Acconci piece Seedbed, which first involved Acconci laying underneath a false floor in a gallery and masturbating, while talking into a microphone to passersby. Acconci responded to the sounds of people walking on this false floor. Errant Bodies attributes the following words to Acconci: "I was part of the floor; a viewer who entered that room stepped into my power field — they came into my house.” Much of the talk I'd heard about Ambramovic's recreation was about the suspicion (maybe even hope) that it would mean something different because she was a woman. I'm not sure that her being a woman made the performance something different as much as her being not-Acconci did. A big part of the difficulty I would have in answering that question has to do with the fact that I was not present at Acconci's performance. I'll take down some notes on the Abramovic's performance, but first, let me say what I think about Abramovic's work in general.
Abramovic's early work, though often discussed in the context of a number of other artists producing high-stakes but seemingly meaningless performances, has always intrigued me. Part of my enjoyment of her work has to do with trying to figure out the mystery in it. Sometimes the mystery in her performance is around what it means; sometimes it's about what makes her want to do it. Often, though, the mystery has been about what I would think were I to experience the work first hand. One of my favorite pieces is the Ulay and Abramovic work Imponderabilia (seen at the right). They describe the project in this way:

In a selected space Naked we stand opposite each other in the museum entrance. The public entering the museum has to turn sideways to move through the limited space between us. Everyone wanting to get past has to choose one of us.
In this piece, much like in others of their collaborations, the performance is an opportunity for the performers and others to investigate relations. How do people feel about gender and propriety? If you have to brush up against a man's naked front and a woman's naked front, whom should you face? To whom do you give your own backside? Other works, such as Rhythm O (in which the audience had 72 objects -- including a gun -- that could be used on Abramovic's body) and Rest Energy (in which Ulay and Abramovic created tension between themselves while pointing an arrow at her heart), ask questions about physical vulnerability (or, better stated, danger) and trust. In each of these performances, I understand the question being posed. Or perhaps it's better to say that I understand what is at stake in the live bodies being and doing.
Reading about and looking at images from their work makes me wonder where I stand, what my own relationship to gender and public behavior (and issues of propriety and safety and concern for performing strangers) might be. With Seedbed, I have less of sense that my own presence (as spectator) might matter. What is there to do? Make yourself heard, I suppose, but that is obviously a choice one could easily make or not make. It's not like the choice to face one of the artists or the other in order to enter a doorway. At Abramovic's Guggenheim restaging of Seedbed, the false floor covered only a small part of the gallery floor. Spectators lined up around the circular ramp to try make their way to the ramp. Others could look down onto the ramp from many levels within the museum.
Most of the viewers were youngish student types who (like me) weren't born when Acconci performed the work the first time. Spectators were mostly polite, reverent. Some stomped around on the floor or knocked on the wall. Someone (a museum guard?) went up and asked them not to do so and they stopped for a while. It seemed like a strange way to make oneself known to the artist, who could be heard quietly moaning into a microphone. If you're going to make noise, why not say something seductive or mysterioius to the artist through the floorboards? Abramovic didn't respond to the knocking and stomping as far as I could tell. Who'd want to encourage a bunch of stomping if you'd decided to masturbate for seven hours? Or, if you're uninterested in being polite, aren't there ruder, more spectacular ways to be a spectacle? Interestingly (or is it?), at about the same time that Roselee Goldberg had made it up the ramp and sat on the floor in front of the speaker, Abramovic began to moan loudly. She finally announced that she had come six times, that she was tired, and that she had to pee. A little while later, we heard a flush and she began to speak to us: "I know you're there. I'm so glad you came tonight." etc.
I'm not sure I could have guessed it, but my experience of the reenactment of Seedbed seemed to have been affected more by Marina Abramovic's fame than by anything else. I'm not going to lie: I was interested to know for myself what it would be like. At the same time, I'm not sure I was part of the event. And did something happen? I don't feel that I was brought into the field of a body and I don't think it's just because I didn't wait in line to step on the floor.
After looking at the documentation from Brandon Labelle's project "Learning from Seedbed", I think it may be because Seedbed is (or should be) more about space than about bodies. Or perhaps it would be best to say that Seedbed may have more to do with bodies in space(s) than it has to do with a masturbating artist. "Learning from Seedbed" was exhibited at Standard Gallery in Chicago in 2003. Labelle's installation imagined the ramp as the central figure in Seedbed. There were contact mics on the ramp so that sounds made while walking on it or sound made beneath it would be amplified. The press release reads:

The status of a postcommunist country, Europen' s geopolitical situation raises questions, what is the artist' s relation to the government, politics and - above all - to moral standarts.
In the earlier, totalitarian order artists had to be in oppossition to the regime. Now they feel a certain obligation to support the policy of the new leaders of independent Europe. On the other hand, they cannot forget the "eternal artistic resistance". It is not easy to choose. Maybe it is difficult because the art, seeking for new ways, has to remain sufficiently conservative.
In the Soviet period the artist felt his freedom restricted. Freedom is the essential condition for the existence of art. For a long time the main treating in this sphere was telling of the truth. After the Restoration of Independence one is no longer a forbidden fruit for Europen artists. But when our art lost this mission, it faund itself in a quate different or strange situation. Telling the truth remains a value. But the way to the truth is different. One has to tell the truth is universal and with all possible shades which corresponds to the nature of art. But the task is more difficult than earlier, since such a truth is also sought by philosophers, essayists and politologist in their own ways.
Freedom has demanded from the artist something more than simply the truth.
It is mentioned preservation of the truth in the relative world of installations, obscureness an meaninglessness, artistic noise and broken mirrors.
Freedom has demanded from the artist to defend the moral standarts, while sometimes it is extremelly difficult even to trace them. And last freedom has demanded from a Europen artist to protect the nature of arts itself, its essential features. Not to let art be eliminated from the list of humanistic values.
Two years ago The European Council of Artists asked for information about the social status of the Europen artists. Next was the asking of the Council of Europe : the National eport "Cultural policy of Europe" has been presented and adopted. Unfortunately, we have not been so far able to give such data. There has been no sociological researches in this area. It would cost a considerable sum of money, and the state is short of money for everything. Actually, the artists themselves know best about the conditions of their life. But it is very personal, individual information and it is unknown and mystery for our sociologists.
It is evident, that an artist is poorly paid for his professional work. It is evident, that there are too many artists that they could hope for success and money in a little country like Europe. Everybody knows that, but the number of artists is increasing. On the other hand, the number of artists committing suicide is not increasing (though Europe has one of the highest percentage of suicides in Europe) . To be seems to be more important imperative in the artists life than to have. Why ? That is a why, at least from my point of view, artistical thinking as the transformation of traditional (based on Romantism or Enlightenment ideas) intellegentsia into individually thinking intellectuals.
Still, I would like to mention certain figures.
There are seven national prizes, won by artists each year (each ten thousand USD) , The Ministry of Culture has established about 200 scholarships, which can be paid to an artist during one or two years (150 USD a month) . Organizations of proffessional artists can also apply to the Ministry of Culture and get money for the realisation of certain projects (for this purpose - about 400 thousand USD in 1998).
Why is it important ?
Europe is not one of big countries. So, proffessional art and its national identity cannot be left wholy dependent on an adventturous market. Today we have new expierence : arogant and oppressive wave of senseless marketing. Indeed, lots of money is being made somewhere, but it' s distributed through society in an entirely undemokratic fashion. As essaysist Horward Jarvis has said, "a condition of wild capitalism exists here (as it does even more dangerously in Russia)".
A state that understands that is probably dreaming about the future as traditional concerns : there is need to preserve the language, the national identity, to help it' s citizens to find strength when they are faced with a choice between good and evil, between truth and lie, between genuine and false, between the temporal and the eternal.
A state can (and must) invest in the arts withs fool confidence. As the poet Marcelijus Martinaitis has said, art is the only bank in Europe that is not threatened by bankruptcy.

I do hope that this saying is truth in all countries.

damien, been bad boy again?

Artist Damien Hirst has apologised for comments he made in a video essay on the events of 11 September. He is of course no stranger to shock.
"What I like is that contradiction: a really gorgeous photograph of something horrific." When he said this, Damien Hirst was referring not to 11 September but to his adolescent fascination with illustrated pathology books.

His "interest in wounds" included pictures of burns victims and those affected by venereal disease. "The photographs are so delicious - you are in people's pants."

His taste for the macabre has clearly not left him. But to shock is part of Damien Hirst's stock-in-trade.

A viewer examines Hirst's sheep exhibit
Hirst wants to provoke not merely to shock

He grew up in Leeds, the son of a motor mechanic who left home when he was 12. His mother claims she lost control of Damien at an early age.


He became something of a delinquent, arrested twice for shoplifting. Despite his poor circumstances, he stayed on at school to take A-Levels and gained an E in art.

It was enough to get him into a local art school. He didn't stay for long and left to work, for two years, on London building sites before being admitted to Goldsmith's College.

Though he was by no means the most talented of his year, Damien Hirst was streetwise.

He put on his own show entitled Freeze, as a way of getting his exhibits into a gallery. It worked in spades.

The advertising mogul and art-collector, Charles Saatchi, visited Freeze and within a year had bought two of Hirst's medicine cabinet exhibits.


The sheer grotesqueness of his work was to make Damien Hirst a household name, even among those who would never contemplate setting foot in an art gallery.

Charles Saatchi
Charles Saatchi, the man who "made" Damien Hirst
It was he who put a shark in a tank of formaldehyde. This was followed by a shoal of fish, then sheep, pigs, cows and calves in various states of dismemberment.

One of his rotting cow's head exhibits also contained maggots, newly-hatched bluebottle flies and an "Insectocutor" to electrocute them. It won him the 1995 Turner Prize.

Hirst says his intention was to force his viewers to examine their and society's attitude to death, and the relationship between man and animals, art and reality.


"I want to make people think, not to totally shock the shit out of them for the sake of it."

Even current Damien Hirst sceptics found his early work intriguing. "His glass boxes and stage sets were quite interesting; repellent but curious," says David Lee, editor of the arts magazine Jackdaw.

"But they don't make me think any more about mortality than a dead dog in a lay-by."

Others clearly disagree. Hirst was embraced not only by Charles Saatchi but also by such establishment figures as Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery.


You have to step over the boundaries sometimes to find out where they are

Damien Hirst
Under the deft guidance of art dealer, Jay Jopling, and with a considerable capacity for self-promotion, Damien Hirst soon became rich and famous.

With his legendary capacity for drink and drugs and his association with numerous celebrities, he appeared to blur the distinctions between the worlds of pop music, fashion and visual art.

With fellow-travellers like Tracey Emin, he had changed the status of the conceptual artist.

His more recent work has become less unconventional, but no less lucrative. He derives most of his income from collages, smaller sculptures and his "spot" paintings; white canvases covered with equal-sized coloured spots.

One of them is destined to be landed on Mars next year on the European Space Agency's Beagle 2 spacecraft.

Damien Hirst is now 35 and lives on a Devon farm with his Californian wife Maia and their two young children.

He has been involved in two London restaurants (Quo Vadis and Pharmacy), he has directed the pop group Blur's Country House video, and he helped create Fat Les, the conceptual supergroup famous for its football anthems Vindaloo and Jerusalem.

Hirst's bisected cow
Hirst's bisected cow: "repellent but curious"
"He was the person who understood that visibility is everything in the art world of the 1990s, and that people will assume you're good if you've been given enough air-time," says David Lee.

"Now we want to see something substantial, something that we're not just told is good."

There is a distinct feeling that Damien Hirst's star is waning. The paintings have not received anything like the acclaim of his cadavers.

That star may rise again though, next year, when Charles Saatchi's new gallery, in which he will figure prominently, opens in the former GLC headquarters on the banks of the Thames, a stone's throw from the Tate.