‘These vintage Converse All Star slip ons are in EXCELLENT near mint condition. The painted canvas pattern is called “Stickers” but looks like anime cartoon comic book mash-up, a Pop Art, Andy Warhol style that are so skater kool. Wear them with skirts, dresses, skinny jeans, cut-offs, or even a suit. A one-of-a-kind as most of these are gone from the market. If they weren’t too big I’d be keeping them for myself, trust me, they’re that good.’

Just thought I’d share them along with the painted and sharpie-d ones I found online. I never tire of the DIY spirit of self-customizing, and its so seamless with the Converse brand’s skater-punk vibe. Or am I being nostalgic, and Converse is as evil as Nike? This Converse story suggests otherwise go here). Etsy too comes out of the DIY legacy — lets hope it stays there. ENJOY!!

MY CONVERSE FOR SALE at romanlovesgigi on etsy.com

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item idem Portrait of Mussolini as Prometheus, 2014
Planter, bubblegum, latex, foam, silk flowers, cereal boxes, acrylic, glass container, popcorn
10 x 22 x 55in (25 x 56 x 140cm)

Duval’s very smart in a resourceful, wily sort of way, as it seems is his partner-in-crime these days, Babak Radboy, who explains their current project, “Shanzai”, a faux art fair, in Art in America as such:

“The phenomenon of shanzhai is deterritorialized at its core—in the same way that a global art market is so obsessed by and so based on territorial expansion, but at the same time has very little to say about the places that it’s in. Whether it’s the Gulf or Istanbul or Baku or China, it’s all Ubers and hotels. The idea of trying to turn something like shanzhai into a place makes a lot of sense.

The way we operate is really based on invitation and opportunity. All of us in some way or another are annoyed at a kind of traditional studio practice and the idea of warehousing art products and labor and waiting for someone to happily discover you, like you’re a mineral resource or something. We really work around the opportunities that present themselves to us. Everything we do is made up for that specific venue, including press—when we have a large article or review coming up we’ll invent the documentation for a piece that maybe didn’t happen.”

I’m not sure what to make of it – the inevitable post-internet conflation of satire with admiration, the knowing consumer’s predicament? – but for those in London this week, check it out and let me know (especially if it “didn’t happen” ). Here’s the press release, and if you want more, check out this feature in V magazine:

SHANZHAI BIENNIAL N°3: 100 HAMILTON TERRACE
Monday Oct. 13th, Project Native Informant, London
Tuesday Oct. 14th, Frieze Projects (Live), booth L1, London

ART PRESS RELEASE:
For it’s third Biennial in as many years, SHANZHAI BIENNIAL will attempt to sell a £32,000,000 estate at Frieze Art Fair, London — for which they stand to make a healthy commission.

Entitled SHANZHAI BIENNIAL N°3: 100 HAMILTON TERRACE, the work consists of twin retail installations running concurrently at Frieze and the gallery Project Native Informant. Featuring a high-gloss advertising campaign in stills and video dispersed in a half dozen prominent press outlets but in the end culminating less in these traces than in the potential commercial transaction they seek to perform.

Transforming both their gallery and their prominently placed booth at Frieze  into fully functioning real estate boutiques, SB has partnered with high-end brokerage Aston Chase in the crafting of a advertising strategy which unlocks the potential of Frieze as a lifestyle brand with a rarified demographic penetration uncannily suited to the London property market.

Taking the iconography and phenomenon of Frieze itself as their starting point, SB responds to an environment of intensely subdivided space, in which a labyrinth of booths recreates in miniature a global landscape of private galleries in an almost platonic representation of the dynamics of culture and commerce.

The fair has coincided with an epoch for the popularity and usefulness of contemporary art — which has itself become indispensable  to the industries of property development, place-branding and ‘reurbaniziation’. The magazine from which it sprang also operates as a rentier of cultural space: producing a publication defined as a space for critical discourse; practically supported through the sale of advertisements. Advertisers effectively pay for space for its proximity to critique.

With it’s crypto-corporate identity evoking limited ethical liability SHANZHAI BIENNIAL decants the space afforded critique as a mediator of culture and commerce by directly profiting not only from the sale but also the production of its work.

With 100 HAMILTON TERRACE, SHANZHAI BIENNIAL squarely leaves the round of artists working within the framework of corporate aesthetics and positions itself as a commercial entity exploiting the art world in a mutually beneficial exchange of services. In the end the biggest winner is the public.

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I came across this 2001 interview I did with Monica Bonvicini in just that way, by accident, and it took me down memory lane. It was for Artforum online, and I came across it googling artists engaged with architecture and gender. Kind of a sweet surprise, as I’d completely forgotten about it (big surprise, ha)! It reminded me of my trip to LA that year, where I saw the show we discussed, though sadly I can’t remember where:(

Here it is as a link, the cut-and-paste below is easier to read, and includes better images, only one of which, sadly, represents the installation I saw. There weren’t anymore online. Its a great work, though, one that made me think again about Bonvicini’s intrepid use of gay S & M imagery at a time when it was still outre or at least before harnesses became a catwalk staple.

Consider it my version of throw back Thursday, and if you want to know more about her work, Phaidon did a great book on the artist, and I threw in a few more pics of other, later work. HAPPY FALL!

Monica Bonvicini talks to Jane Harris about architecture and the iconology of construction workers.

For several years now, Monica Bonvicini has been something of a heckler, taking aim at the granddaddy of all aesthetic boys clubs: architecture. In her 1999 Venice Biennale work, I Believe in the Skin of Things as in That of Women, the Italian-born artist turned Le Corbusier’s well-known comment on its head, vandalizing the facades of a boxlike room she had built and covering the broken walls with graffiti.

Quotations from other famous male architects, such as Auguste Perret and Adolf Loos, were juxtaposed with obscene words and caricatures of naked men holding square sets, masturbating, or gazing at bejeweled women. Eternmale, 2000, installed at the Kunsthaus Glarus, featured slick white chairs and tables designed by Willy Guhl (from bent panels of Eternit, a mixture of cement and cellulose), an electric-blue carpet, ambient music from porno films, a video monitor displaying a burning log, and Picasso’s Tête de Femme (Head of a woman), 1963. A parody of a playboy pad from the 1960s, the room offered the ultimate guy space for chilling out, seducing chicks, and refueling the testosterone.

Bonvicini’s sense of humor is incisive and often chilly, sort of like Bruce Nauman on dry ice. Her themes—the libidinous charge of architectural space and the often sexist presumptions that underlie its theory—are considered with critical distance but are tweaked empirically by her lifestyle. She has spent over a decade dividing her time between Los Angeles and Berlin, two cities very active in the promotion of new architecture, especially the latter, where the buzz about building a new Berlin has been as loud as the cement mixers and drills, not to mention the hoots and hollers of construction workers whom women cross the street to avoid.

These Days Only a Few Men Know What Work Really Means, 1999

For Bonvicini, construction workers are, on the one hand, laborers who toil with no glory; on the other, purveyors of aggressive masculinity. But it is precisely the complex class and gender issues they embody that make them interesting to her. In Fuckeduptimes, 1999, Bonvicini interviewed bricklayers, asking them questions like “What does your wife/girlfriend think of your rough and dry hands?” and hired them to build minimalist structures in limestone.

This past May and June, Bonvicini presented a number of works at the inaugural exhibition of The Project in Los Angeles. One of these, These days only a few men know what work really means, 1999, delved into the contradictory symbolism of construction workers. The piece explores the psychosocial dynamics of advertising billboards, which the artist has overlaid with images of gay sex and quotations taken from the simultaneously public and private world of Internet chat rooms.

Both Ends, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2010

Jane Harris: Tell me about your piece These days only a few men know what work really means.

Monica Bonvicini: I find it interesting that construction workers are so popular in gay erotica, but, at the same time, are well known for their extreme heterosexual behavior. There are other connotations in the piece as well. When I first showed it at the the Art Basel fair in 1999, I used portable aluminum walls that belonged to the fair, and kind of mocked the idea of an art-fair “statement.” The metaphor of a bunch of construction guys fucking each other (images I found in a gay porno magazine), and the misspelled quotations I took from the Internet, were hard to digest for quite a number of viewers. And then there are the two black-and-white pictures of Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves, both of whom are literally wearing their own architecture in the form of models. But as you say, I had been working with construction materials, on construction sites, and with construction workers for a while.

JH: You did a piece at the MIT List Center for which you made an impenetrable structure from chain link, cinder block, and Home Depot wood trellises. Aren’t you working with Home Depot fences for another work, Turning Walls, 2001?

MB: The piece at the MIT group show was Turning Walls—the same piece I am showing in Grenoble.

Monica Bonvicini, Built for Crime, 2006, SculptureCenter, New York, Broken safety glass, bulbs, 5 dimmer packs, lan box, 4′ x 40-1/2

JH: I really like BEDTIMESQUARE, 1999. It’s a realization of a drawing you did some time ago, isn’t it?

MB: Yes. BEDTIMESQUARE was based on a drawing from the series “Smart Quotations,” 1996. The work relates to a piece of Carl Andre’s. Because of the industrial materials and the inflatable mattress in the middle, it is, metaphorically speaking, like sleeping in a Minimal sculpture. The bed, along with the window and the wall, are classical representations of feminine space. You know, the history of the bed is very interesting.
JH: Especially in performance art. Chris Burden, Gina Pane, and Vito Acconci all used beds or bedlike structures to draw connections between the body and the institutional frameworks in which it operates. So did Valie Export. What are you working on now?

MB: I just opened the show at Le Magasin in Grenoble. I’m also preparing a public art project for the Aussendienst in Hamburg, which deals again with the language of commercialism and its relation to art. I’m going to produce billboards developed by Scholtz & Friends, one of the biggest advertising companies in Europe, for buses and subway stations in Hamburg.
JH: Will you use construction-worker imagery again?

MB: Maybe. Why not?

Both Ends, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2010

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I especially love his buddha pieces, though he’s quite famous for his Egyptian collection, both from the 1970s. The Egyptian revival bib necklace I was trying to figure out the provenance of could’ve been an example of the latter, but there was no signature. It sold for $85 (first image here) in 8 hours to a jewelry collector who will no doubt flip it on his Etsy shop. What can you do? ANYWAY, I tried to include a few pics that give a real indication of the scale of these designs, some of which are colossal in their opulence. Enjoy!

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Since I’ve worn “vintage” clothing since the early, mid-1980s, from high school on (mostly late 1960s to early-mid 1970s), I’ve got things that old I’ve hung on to. I’ve also always decorated/outfitted my apartments with period furniture, linens, dish ware, etc. first with Deco, then mid-century, then space-age Panton era stuff, too, so this stuff will find its way into the shop too. Hopefully, the recent passion for all things “vintage” – Gap adverts acknowledge its lure, promoting their “technologically advanced” fabrics as a way to counter the competition – has created enough of a competitive market for it that I’ll make some money:)            

People are certainly willing to pay a lot more than I ever did or do. Time will tell, and romanlovesgigi is still in its infancy, the process being quite tedious (I will never look at an online auction/individually owned business the same again), so vintage lovers check back often as I’ll be uploading new items every day.        

On a totally different note, I just finished reading John Edgar Wideman’s 1990 novel, Philadelphia Fire, a poetic, meta-narrative about the infamous MOVE organization, whose West Philly headquarters were infamously fire-bombed by the city in 1985, killing 10 people, and decimating many houses around them.

Its a rather elliptical rendering, with very minimal attention to the facts told through tertiary narratives that take the form of the narrator’s recollections of growing up in Philadelphia as an African-American, working-class kid who became a creative-class/academic. These quasi-biographical discursions nonetheless evoke the guts and heart of the people moving in and out of the shadows of this historic catastrophe, and Wideman writes them right after it happens, so it’s both very vivid and yet removed from linear time (not enough facts/reflection to draw from so soon?).

If you want to better understand the tensions leading up to the fire-bombing (imagine your city block suddenly attacked like that as a means of routing out the inhabitants of one house), and the cult nature of MOVE, they are very compellingly conveyed in this great 2013 documentary, Let the Fire Burn, which you can watch for free! Its comprised mostly of found footage, and is just as entrancing as Wideman’s book, which is its poetic corollary.
You really get a sense of how much John Africa, the very intelligent founder of MOVE, was able to marshall this rag-tag army of followers, and turn their refusal to live by social norms into a revolution of sorts. And the way the state responds. It got me thinking about Jim Baker, another guru/leader whose philosophy over time became distorted by power, evolving into its own incendiary form of anarchy, if not literally. There’s a 2013 doc on his cult (I use that word, btw, in its most neutral sense) , The Source Family, also free online.     Along with the renewed interest in vintage stuff, it seems the fascination for all things cult has also re-emerged, perhaps in relation to the populist trend for going off the grid, and forming self-sufficient communities anathema to corporate-consumer existence.

The whole 1970s cult phenomena, a time when there were over 3,000 such self-identified orgs, its link to spiritual, civil rights, and sexual revolutions of the time, is of course, perpetually fascinating to me. I did, after all, in a moment of naive embrace, consider joining the Hari Krishnas in college when they came recruiting on campus, and joined a coven for a brief time after grad school with a boyfriend.

Of course, I could never submit to an individual’s authority, esp. a man (I got enough of that growing up Catholic), but the desire for spiritual growth has and will always appeal, and not just to me. Thinking, as atheists do, that any such pursuit is simply fantasy-inducing escapism, a willing of your power away to some non-existent force, is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater imho. Though the dangers of leaders gone awry, of the inevitable corruption that comes with power, etc. are of course, inescapably real.

Probably why when I participated in a summer solstice ritual this weekend, which brought me back to my “new age” moment of the 1980s, I experienced pleasure/nostalgia with a smidgen of cynical doubt, the same irony from which this blog’s name derived. How to be authentic without the foundation and legacy of tradition, historical, cultural, and biographical? Does donning the clothes of another era beg the same question? Certainly when I watch 20-somethings parade around in their long hair and beards, shirtless in their birkenstocks, I do wonder. Food for thought….

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CUT-N-PASTE FROM: http://tinyhouseblog.com
Gregory’s Homeless Homes Project
by Christina Nellemann on February 17th, 2014. 36 Comments
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Many readers of the Tiny House Blog might know Gregory Kloehn best from his Dumpster home that was featured on Inside Edition and the Rachel Ray Show. Gregory now has a new project in the works. The Homeless Homes Project, which features tiny structures built out of illegally dumped garbage and industrial waste, are becoming more than an environmental stance or garbage art. These little homes are fast becoming a collaborative project between different groups who want to help shelter people who live on the streets.

With names like R2D2, Romanian Farm House, Uni-bomber Shack and The Chuck Wagon, these structures are built from pallets, bed frames, futon frames, doors, plywood, OSB, paint, packing crates, car consoles, auto glass, refrigerator shelves and anything else Gregory can find in local dumping areas around his home in Oakland. He looks for anything that has real wood, tempered glass and sturdy frames, and only purchases nails, screws, glue, paint brushes and saw blades. When a home is completed, he pushes it into the street, take a few photos and then gives it away.

“From that point on, I have no more say in it,” Gregory said. “The homes take on a life of their own. One was stolen, one was sold, one was firebombed, one is in a neighbor’s backyard with dogs living in it, the rest are still on the streets with people living in them.”

Gregory’s initial concept of these homes was not to house the homeless but came about because of some research he was conducting on homeless architecture and the various structures built by people who live on the street. He was inspired by their resourcefulness to take found objects and create homes and a livelihood from them.

“I was inspired to take these same materials back to my shop and put them together in a more permanent fashion,” Gregory said. “After about a week of collecting and building, I had a 21st century hunter/gather home, built from the discarded fruits of the urban jungle.”

“This sat at my studio for a number of months, just collecting dust,” he continued. “One rainy night, Charlene, a homeless woman I’ve known for some 10 years, asked if I had a tarp for her. I told her I didn’t have one and I went back inside. As I walked past the home, it hit me, I should give her this. I ran back out and told her to come back tomorrow and I would have a home for her. She and her husband Oscar came back the next day. I handed them a set of keys and a bottle of champagne and watched them push it down the street. It felt so good that I started making another one that same day.”

Gregory’s now working on the projects with several community groups and people who come to his shop to help. The plan is to move into a larger space that can accommodate workshops and larger builds. He said his Dumpster home project taught him many lessons that he’s applying to the Homeless Homes including sticking to his original vision.

“Regardless of what others say, or what you may even say to yourself about an idea, if you think it has merit and you want to do it, you should just do it,” he said. “Don’t let petty details derail your desires, you can deal with those later, what’s important is the essence of your ideas.”

Gregory’s interest in tiny homes came from building a lot of different homes and condos over the years and realizing that the smaller projects actually made him happier.

“There is a spontaneity and playfulness in making small homes that traditional houses do not offer,” Gregory said. “It reminds me of making forts as a kid, no city planners, no architects, no crews, no bank loans, just my ideas and my hands.”

Photos by Gregory Kloehn

By Christina Nellemann for the [Tiny House Blog]

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Equally doll-like if a lot more sexy are Miss Van’s curvaceous female cartoons, which, whether on street walls or paper, have the same push-pull of the mysterious and the cutesy. Festooned with Jessica Rabbit lips, their pucker more sulk than sass, they’ve got an inexplicable appeal. So from my desktop to your window, here they are, in all their strange reciprocity!

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Ever heard of Baker-Miller pink? Me neither. I came across it randomly on a recent image search and it intrigued me. The idea of a color that could calm violent prisoners. It was devised by a researcher, Alexander Schauss, in the 1970s. He wanted to know, specifically, if various wavelengths of light – ie. color – could trigger “profound and measurable responses in the endocrine system”.

Well, as someone who’s had her share of hormonal issues, ha!, I thought it was rather telling that my bedroom walls, while not this particular chemical mix, have been some shade of pink for years. And increasingly hot and saturated, lolz. I’ve also been drawn to vivid yellow, which I call “artificial cheer” because it instantly elevates my mood (like the Christmas lights I keep up all year).

Growing up though it was all about purple. Perhaps as a rejection of pink, or the kind of baby pink associated with girls?

One of Schauss’s primary influences was the work of Swiss psychiatrist Max Lüscher, who argued that color preferences were psychologically revealing. He theorized this using four fundamental colors/associations:

Blue: Contentment[1]

Feeling of belonging, the inner connection and the relationship to one’s partner.
“How I feel towards a person that is close to me”

Green: Self-respect[2]

Inner control of willpower and the capacity to enjoy.
“The way I want to be”

Red: Self confidence[3]

Activity, drive and the reaction to challenges.
“How I react to challenges”

Yellow: Development[4]

Attitude of anticipation, attitude towards future development and towards new encounters.
“What I expect for the future”

I recall being aware of some of these associations as a kid, which makes me wonder if the choice to identify with a certain color reflects not what’s intrinsic psychologically, but what’s desired/projected. I also remember wanting to know everyone’s favorite color. My dad’s was green and my mom’s was red, both reflecting a pretty accurate correspondence to not just their personalities but how they strove to define themselves, I think. Also, I remember in high school when a good friend of mine became obsessed with orange, I found it inexplicably repulsive. Somehow it seemed garish and synonymous with Orange Crush – all sugary and fake. Or maybe it just didn’t go with her blonde hair and pink skin? Who knows. I actually love orange now and have a lot of it in my apartment (mostly in the form of 1960s space age furniture, which no doubt helped recalibrate my relationship to the color).

So obviously associations are environmental/cultural too. Regardless, one ever told me yellow represented development and the future. I thought it was just symbolic of sun and light and joy. I think that brightness has come to signify optimism (sun cults, etc.), and perhaps that’s what Lüscher means when he describes it as a future-oriented attitude. So maybe yellow should be the official color of utopia (notify pantone immediately)! There’s no coincidence that it dominates my blog design. And as for Baker-Miller pink, the color of calm, it has a place in the future too (my bedroom walls, no doubt!)

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JELENA BEHREND:

ANDREA CORSON:

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There’s no easy way to sum up his work, or anyone doing important intriguing difficult visionary work in a blog post (yes, they have their limits). Its body-based, durational, in keeping with what’s been deemed the “masochistic” work of artists like Gina Pane, Bob Flanagan, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (my Believer piece on Gen’s Warhol show is up, btw, if you haven’t seen it!). Still that says little to nothing about the profoundly sacrificial aspects of his work, or how BDSM-queer theory have shaped it. Some performances can be hard to witness, a testament to their power IMHO, other are downright warm and fuzzy. Many people seem unable to let go of their discomfort long enough to see how deeply intelligent, thoughtful, and giving Athey is, instead – almost invariably – he’s treated like a freak show. And I’m talking about art journalists here.

BUT the point of this post was to share a few pics culled from a Google image search I did after I saw Ron’s new profile pic (after his 30-day probation). As you can see, it shows him in warrior stance, right palm above heart, tribal body sleeve almost done. I was particularly attracted to the nipple studs, the stretching of the skin to accommodate them the way ear lobs are commonly done. It looked really beautiful. Body modification as an expression of malleability interests me, and the results can be striking. The culture around it is never one I’ve been active in as I’m hopelessly squeamish about cutting into my body. I distinctly recall feeling violated when I got my ears pierced, LMAO, at 16, I guess by the violent blast of the gun. Perhaps method is everything. I don’t have any tattoos. I have friends who are covered and I love it (when the art is good, obviously), and sometimes I want to just cover my body, even my face. But I never do. Instead I wait and appreciate it on others:) But I do sometimes like to look at what people are up to, what the trends are (like last year’s bagel head).

Ok, well here are some images of nipple adornment/modification I came across that I found appealing/fun! And if its too tame for you, check out this blog by former founder of BME (Body Modification Ezine) where he talks about flayed penises.

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