Flarf

Poets & Writers has an article this month about Flarf.

Flarf is a style of poetry that has a surrealist feel to it. Basically it is good poets trying to make bad poetry by using techniques like pulling random phrases from Google searches and riffing off each other's bad lines of poetry.

It started out as a joke--a poet submitting an intentionally bad poem to a vanity poetry anthology scam:

Yeah, mm-hmm, it's true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my 'huppa'-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!

-- Gary Sullivan

Soon Sullivan's poet friends joined the fun. And, according to the article, a funny thing happened:

Their poems evolved from "bad" to "sort of great," Gardner says. "What we were really doing was throwing out rules that were constraining and ridiculous and weren't fitting anymore. Once we did that, we could do whatever we wanted—we weren't trying to ask: Is this magazine going to like this? Is this poet going to like this? Is my teacher going to like this? We just got rid of all of it and went nuts."

[via kottke]

House imprints

photo by Marcus Buck

Pruned blog writes:

(From our repository of decorative whatnots and filler knickknackeries, this photogenic ghostly imprint of aborted architecture. Some refer to them as medianeras, others as the unconscious art of demolition. Our own fancy phraseology is urban graffiti of absence. The photograph above by Marcus Buck comes from his photo series called Restarchitektur, viewable via “Freie Arbeiten” on his flash website. With thanks to the artist for the photo.)

[via kottke]

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These inadvertent documentations of houses remind me of Rachel Whiteread's work. Whiteread is best known for her negative-space casts of rooms and houses:

Sneakin' Into the Museums

B. Griffith, SF MoMA; San Francisco, California USA

ArtFagCity is soliciting maps of how to sneak into museums (to avoid paying the entrance fee):

Offering sage advice for the penniless and pocket-heavy alike, artist Peter Coffin’s “How to Sneak into a Museum Without Paying” project features hand drawn maps from contributors around the globe. Thus far he’s culled a handful of floor plans and museum maps instructing readers how on how to beat the system and avoid museum fees for a forthcoming bookzine published by Printed Matter.

This week we pair with Peter Coffin to solicit submissions for this awesome endeavor. Drawings should be in black pencil or pen on an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper, scanned in grayscale at 200 dpi. Email submissions with your preferred contact info, including your website link, to karen@artfagcity.com no later than Thursday, July 30th. We’ll feature the best submissions in a follow-up post on Tuesday August 4th.

See my earlier post on museums with free admission.

And to get you into the sneaking mood, here's the Sneakin' Into the Movies scene from Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle:

Thomas Thwaites completes "The Toaster Project"

In February I blogged about Thomas Thwaites then in-progress The Toaster Project:

The project is his ongoing quest to built a toaster from scratch... and by scratch I mean actually gathering iron ore and smelting it, collecting oil and processing it into plastic, etc.

It's an absolutely brilliant and humorous way to explore our dependence on cheap, easily available goods. The extremes that Thwaites has gone through (and will go through) brings to light the industry behind the small luxuries that we take for granted.

This morning I saw on Make's blog that Thwaites has completed his toaster and is now making toast. The Toaster Project's website hasn't been updated to show the completed appliance, but it can be seen on the Royal College of Art's Design Interactions Show website.

Love it!

Matchbox's child warriors

Matchbox has an advertising campaign which pictures children as military personnel. A commenter on Boing Boing suggested contrasting these fantasy images with photos of real child soliders.



"Credit" for the Matchbox compaign goes to Ogilvy & Mather:

Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Singapore
Executive Creative Director: Todd McCracken
Art Director: Anthony Tham
Photographers: Shooting Gallery, Wishing Well
Producer: Iskandar Abdul Kader
Published: May 2009

Andy Freeberg's "Guardians"

Andy Freeberg's Guardians is a wonderful series of photographs that capture the ladies who guard the art galleries of Russian art museums.




Freeberg says:

In the art museums of Russia, women sit in the galleries and guard the collections. When you look at the paintings and sculptures, the presence of the women becomes an inherent part of viewing the artwork itself. I found the guards as intriguing to observe as the pieces they watch over. In conversation they told me how much they like being among Russia’s great art. A woman in Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery Museum said she often returns there on her day off to sit in front of a painting that reminds her of her childhood home. Another guard travels three hours each way to work, since at home she would just sit on her porch and complain about her illnesses, "as old women do." She would rather be at the museum enjoying the people watching, surrounded by the history of her country.

[via Boing Boing]

Robert Smithson's "Hotel Palenque"

A thread of comments on an earlier post got me thinking about Robert Smithson. Here's his Hotel Palenque (1969) lecture. I first heard the lecture when it was recreated by one of my professors in grad school. We had a bit of a disagreement about the lecture's intent--the professor seemed to think that Smithson was completely earnest whereas I felt that the lecture (which was originally given to architecture graduate students) was a little tongue-in-cheek (but also sincere).

Video courtesy of UbuWeb. Visit their site to download the video, read a critical essay on the lecture, and/or download an Acrobat file of the lecture's text.

Lucas Knipscher's "Erasure on Newspaper"

This morning I stumbled across Lucas Knipscher's Erasure on Newspaper series in the online version of "..."

Consider this an addendum to yesterday's The Art of Removal post.

The Art of Removal

Tourist Remover is an online app that can remove moving objects from your vacation snapshots. It does so by comparing several photos from the same angle and removing whatever isn't common to all photos (see above).

Removing unwanted folks from photos has a long tradition:



The tourist photo that jumped to my mind is Francis Alÿs's Turista (1996). So this morning I photoshopped No Turista (2009):


Here's a thumbnail animation of the alteration:


Andy Baio recently posted Meme Scenery on his blog in which he removes the people from 23 famous Internet photos/videos:


Baio points to Jon Haddock's Internet Sex Photos as inspiration:


An earlier work in the same vein is Naomi Uman's Removed (1999) in which she removed a writhing, naked woman from a soft-core porn film. Uman also create Touch My Body (De-Mariahed) in response to Oliver Laric’s Touch My Body (Green Screen Version) (2008).

Neils Bonde's Bad Days series involves painting out scenes of tragedy and pain from newspaper clippings. I admire the non-digital-ness of his process:


And of course mention must be made of Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953):


Addendum, 7/23/09: To this round up I'd also add Desiree Palmen's camouflage work

50 Greatest Trailers of All Time

IFC (the Independent Film Channel) posted their list of the 50 greatest movie trailers of all time. Interestingly, the top three are all horror films: Alien, Psycho, Cloverfield (number four is Miracle on 34th Street). Perhaps horror films, where the excitement comes from the unknown and the implied, are particularly suited to the short, trailer format.

The list's compilers seem to like meta-trailers (where the trailer talks about the movie as a movie)... Psycho, Miracle on 34th Street, The Comedian (#5 in the list), Citizen Kane (#6) are all self-referencing trailers. I'm surprised that This Is Spinal Tap's teaser didn't make the cut:



(There is another, longer version of the teaser that seems geared towards movie theater operators).


Alien's trailer:



IFC says about Alien's trailer:

Masterfully cut and artful to boot, the first glimpse of Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-horror classic features not a single word of dialogue and begins in abstract: a ride through a star field, a hover above some sort of moon rock, blocky shapes that slowly materialize into the letters of the title, craggy landscape traversed with a macro lens before pulling back to clarify what lies on that cratered surface -- the egg of an alien life form. It cracks open, releasing an ill-omened white light and the high-pitched alarm (an animalistic squeal?) that unnerves throughout the rest of the trailer.

Astronauts tiptoe into an extraterrestrial ship, crosscut with Sigourney Weaver inexplicably running through corridors, with confounding/enticing images flashing almost subliminally in between (a space crew awakening from hyper-sleep, Harry Dean Stanton's bewildered close-up) before all hell breaks loose (an obscured Ian Holm spurting milky blood, a cat hissing, a never-before-seen "face hugger" in a frenzy). From above the planet, an onscreen title ultimately seals the deal, seeming all the more foreboding for the vaccuum of diegetic sound that came before it: "In space, no one can hear you scream." It's one of the most famous taglines of all time, though I'm quite partial to the far less effective "Alien3" slogan that ambiguously referenced either a breeding alien or Weaver's Lt. Ripley, believe it or not ("In case you haven't noticed, the bitch is back"). --Aaron Hillis

[via kottke]