Saturday, 9 May 2009
The Art of Memory
I really can't find the words to adequately describe this blog...It describes itself as...
"adventures in minimalism including film, music, literature, poetry, architecture, and art"
Check it out for yourself here.
Spirit of Ecstasy
This comic, written by Mairead Case
, is now appearing in a promo zine made by Light in the Attic Records. It celebrates their re-release of Serge Gainsbourg's classic "Melody Nelson" album.(Click here to read page two of the comic.
)(Via dlasky@lj here.)
Friday, 8 May 2009
Jenny Saville - "Passage"
Jenny Saville: With the transvestite I was searching for a body that was between genders. I had explored that idea a little in Matrix. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts. Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn’t have existed and I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender – a sort of gender landscape. To scale from the penis, across a stomach to the breasts, and finally the head. I tried to make the lips and eyes be very seductive and use directional mark-making to move your eye around the flesh.Simon Schama: So you really do manipulate what’s in front of you through the mark-making. It’s very striking – I’m looking at a photograph of your transvestite painting Passage and that passage that moves from the penis and balls to the belly is really about the anatomy of paint as it constructs the body.
Jenny Saville: I have to really work at the tension between getting the paint to have the sensory quality that I want and be constructive in terms of building the form of a stomach, for example, or creating the inner crevice of a thigh. The more I do it, the more the space between abstraction and figuration becomes interesting. I want a painting realism. I try to consider the pace of a painting, of active and quiet areas. Listening to music helps a lot, especially music where there’s a hard sound and then soft breathable passages. In my earlier work my marks were less varied. I think of each mark or area as having the possibility of carrying a sensation. (Extract from ‘Interview with Jenny Saville by Simon Schama)
Saatchi Gallery here.
Superb site with lots of images here.
Glynn Griffiths, 'Jenny Saville in front of Plan', The Independent, Tuesday March 1, 1994
LYRICS: Manic Street Preachers - '4st 7lbs'
I eat too much to die
And not enough to stay alive
I'm sitting in the middle waiting
Days since I last pissed
Cheeks sunken and despaired
So gorgeous sunk to six stone
Lose my only remaining home
See my third rib appear
A week later all my flesh disappears
Stretching taut, cling-film on bone
I'm getting better
Karen says I've reached my target weight
Kate and Emma and Kristin know it's fake
Problem is diet's not a big enough word
I wanna be so skinny that I rot from view
I want to walk in the snow
And not leave a footprint
I want to walk in the snow
And not soil its purity
Stomach collapsed at five
Lift up my skirt my sex is gone
Naked and lovely and 5st. 2
May I bud and never flower
My vision's getting blurred
But I can see my ribs and I feel fine
My hands are trembling stalks
And I can feel my breasts are sinking
Mother tries to choke me with roast beef
And sits savouring her sole Ryvita
That's the way you're built my father said
But I can change, my cocoon shedding
I want to walk in the snow
And not leave a footprint
I want to walk in the snow
And not soil its purity
Kate and Kristin and Kit Kat
All things I like looking at
Too weak to fuss, too weak to die
Choice is skeletal in everybody's life
I choose my choice, I starve to frenzy
Hunger soon passes and sickness soon tires
Legs bend, stockinged I am Twiggy
And I don't mind the horror that surrounds me
Self-worth scatters, self-esteem's a bore
I long since moved to a higher plateau
This discipline's so rare so please applaud
Just look at the fat scum who pamper me so
Yeh 4st. 7, an epilogue of youth
Such beautiful dignity in self-abuse
I've finally come to understand life
Through staring blankly at my navel
From 'The Holy Bible' by the Manic Street Preachers.
