Bob and Roberta Smith is a one man show. Him and his sister Roberta used to collaborate, but she has since dropped from the duo. Despite that, Bob Smith (who is by birth Patrick Brill) chose to keep the double name. This British artist does just about everything.
Last fall Bob and Roberta Smith installed a show at The Factory Outlet in London. Check out this Art Review interview with the artist.
And some work:
Bicycle powered tree at the Tate Modern, 2208
He is also in a Band named “The Apathy Band“, you can see their videos and listen to their jams on MySpace.
This is an older installation-in-progress of Swoon and Monica Canilao, which I found out from this Fecal Face blog. It’s from 2008 but is still super fresh.
Also… I found someone who may be into Tetris more than me.
that was work from Michael Johansson, the Swedish artist that I would love have my furniture designed from. A kitchen-object-kitchen table? Made of blenders and tupperware? Yes please!
and some more tetris-inspired works…
These works are by Takayuki Nakazawa and Hiroshi Manaka– I’m digging the tightly-packed DVDs in the tightly-packed spaces. Just… pure eye candy.
and…. eat your heart out, lakers fans. meet mark bradford
It’s been a little too long, cloud juicees– anyone wanting an orange-and-cumulous smoothie, let’s get together and share some more images to look at!
In lieu of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I wanted to focus on artists that have somewhat of a political agenda. Who would have thought Houston, of all places, would be the birth place an incredibly articulate collective whose goal is “to teach the truth to young Black youth.” According to reviews of their installation at the Menil entitled “Lessons from Below”, “they’re also managing to teach people who aren’t young and aren’t black.”
Meet Otabenga Jones & Associates, an organization of visual and literary artist/activist based out of Houston. The organization is named after Ota Benga, an African Pygmy brought to the United States in 1904 and who was on display at the Bronx Zoo during a time that it was popular to exhibit Africans and other non-Western peoples for public entertainment. The zoo released Ota Benga after some years and upon realizing the improbability of his return to Africa, Ota Benga ended his own life in 1916. His death certificate read, “Otti Bingo,” a nickname he had received from fellow employees at the tobacco factory he had found work. This alone should illustrate the keen sensitivity to black history that fuels this collective, which realizes themselves in the form of actions, writings, and installations.
The members of the organization include, Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans and Robert Pruitt. In the last few years they have had a few collaborative installations, including one at the Menil where they were given free range to curate a show with elements culminated from the storehouses of the Menil collection. As a collective they are a powerful, intelligent, but yet graceful crew of contemporaries illuminating historical and current trends in African representation, what’s more is that they are each outstanding artists individually. Check them out, I can say no more.
They currently have a website featuring a collection of amazing videos, some of which are being revoked from youtube, for whatever reason.
One of many badass videos you’ll find on their website:
Individual works by a few members of the collective:
So, I was checking out this blog, The Best Part, and apparently this is old news to them, but it’s new news to me. Isn’t it the greatest?! Yeondoo Jung’s series of photographs entitle “Wonderland”, are inspired by drawings created by kids. You can see Yeondoo Jung’s whole collection of photographs here. Enjoy!
Part of the post speaks of how human walkways are altered by the presence of water puddles. Puddles have been more on my mind as of late since my sneakers are coming undone around the toes. One misplaced step leads to hours of potential cold and moist discomfort. As the said post mentions, a puddle map could aid one in planning a journey through an urban area laden with these temporary lakes of minuscule proportions. We could have multiple maps in order to adjust to different levels of precipitation. Maybe a digital GIS interface would be the most efficient. I’d like to document, measure, and name a few of these puddles in my neighborhood.
During their short existence, many of these water bodies must cradle life to some extent, whether it’s the larval/nymph stage of an insect or a few short sips by a passing bird. Some of these organisms, particularly the itsy-bitsy, spend either large portions or their entire lives in the puddles. Miniature watersheds determine where the water flows. A curb, rock, branch, or other local object could influence the existence of an intermittent puddle. The presence of a leaf could alter the trajectory of a tiny stream providing habitat for microbial life. The leaf’s absence could rob the colony’s chance for survival.
Erosion occurs on a smaller scale but time is the main ingredient between the following:
Thousands of local seeds transported by urban runoff.
Sand tufa formations - remains of calcium carbonate deposits fed from ancient freshwater springs. The surrounding sand has since eroded.
Our transient lives are not unlike the spawn of the brief puddles. Let us not take life-giving puddles of any size for granted.
As an ongoing project, a conceptual artist from Uruguay is developing his own style of self portraiture.
For this series, Alejandro Cesarco is developing a book index to an autobiography of himself that doesn’t exist – yet. Now, isn’t that a clever concept?
index of a book I haven’t yet written and most probably never will. A container that becomes its own content. The index is half way biographical and half way theory text; it is extremely personal, at times even hermetic, yet full of clichés. A-Z in 12 pages, digital c-prints, 20 x 16 inches ea., 2000
An index is like the guts of a book, the nitty gritty of everything that book can offer you. I like the idea of breaking up every aspect of your life into: categories, subcategories and really really small categories, with the anticipation that someone would flip to the back of your autobiography searching for that one specific little detail about you.
Cesarco’s use of an index format to create self portraits offers the viewer the chance to learn about the artist in a very objective, matter of fact way. But is he really being straightforward? Maybe the work just gives that impression because we are looking at text rather than images. But without a context, in this case, an actual book, the audience is left to assume how the word is being used or is relevant to the artist. In the end, our idea of Cesarco is no less cloudy, and our assumptions aren’t any more resolved. But, I don’t mind one bit.
Another work by Cesarco, click here to visit his website:
the ramones (an autobiography) song list, organized in chronological order, of every ramones song that begins with the pronoun I. digital c-print , 40 x 30 inches, 2008
I’m really excited about seeing this artists work first hand and hearing him speak about his process. There will be a dialogue on January 14.2010 at Artpace. Hope to see you there!
i once stored everything i owned (sans the little dachshund that needed to be fed) in a 10×10 storage unit. we had to play a bit of tetris to get everything to fit, but once i stood in front of the opened garage door with everything i have in front of me, i felt…. i dont know. white? cleansed? i felt like i could get on the back of a motor bike and just go and not worry about anything but paying the storage rent on time. and i sort of did…
this work is by a cat i found off one of my favorite blogs butdoesitfloat — may i introduce to you simon evans :
hes represented by james cohan gallery, if youre interested in seeing more of simon’s work. i dont know, i just… i love this idea of collecting and documenting the things we own. i love the memory of seeing everything i own in a rectangular room. i love that i closed that garage door and locked the lock and left behind all the things that weigh me. i thought, for my third of the blogging contribution, id keep to date some documentations of the things i own and the things that own me. thats like that one quote in fight club, right? im excited about this juicing of the clouds and ill be updating from my central texan apartment as much as i can. hello, blog world. its nice to meet you. and its nice to puree some clouds with my fellow juicers gabriela and topher! good day and happy 2010 to the blog
Cloudjuices 
