Alexandre Orion by Jane

Graffiti artists are usually known for their wild way of painting, a totally outlaw practice on the walls of the cities. They want to cover the grey buildings of the town with their spraycans of color painting in spite of the police.

Alexandre Orion is a brasilian street artist who tries to deliver an alarming message through his work. In this video, there is one of his action in an underpass at Sao Paulo. Orion  is not using  spraycans or any paints in this performing: only with a piece of cloth, he’s cleaning the wall, drawing in the layer of filth covering the wall of the channel. One after one, Alexander Orion makes skulls appear through the dirt.

Here is a strong denunciation of the way that pollution grows up in the city and that people don’t really care about it. Alexandre Orion wants to show them  how they let their town defacing. The violent figures of the skulls, a direct link to the idea of death, are here to shocked people passing by and to questionning them about their passiv acceptation of this pollution that they generate.

BANKSY – Londres

I chose Banksy because he is one of contemporary artists i admire the most and he inspire me when i look all his works. His idea, his way of looking things, his pencil stroke are very powerful.
Banksy is the artist of the most famous street in Britain but his anonymity is vital because his vandalism is very expensive now. His stencils, sarcastic irony, are a critical of the present world . Corruption, the folly of consommation are recurring themes in his works. He does rats armed with drills, monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, girls with a missile, on the famous monuments, it often inscribed: “This is not worth being photographed.”
Ever in vandal, he introduce his works in great museum like the Tate Gallery in October 2003 for exemple.
I think it’s interesting to uncover this famous artist.

HIS WEB SITE

BRAIN DAMAGE – KAOPHONIC TRIBU by Clément

I went to concert to FIGEAC and i saw “brain damage” & “kaophonic tribu“.

The group Brain damage was born in 1999 it’s a groupe music to Saint Etienne it’s a dub-électro. They played their last album ” Short cuts”. It was their fourth album. In this album Brain Damage develop a reflection on the urgency, frustration and the intensit: all will have to be known as in a minimum of time. For that, none of the 24 titles of this project will exceed the two minutes. On scene it’s very impressing they are only two on scene but the sound who making it’s very great. Their sound transports us in another world one like is hypnotized. I loves this group!!

Kaophonic tribu it’s a music group of 8 musicians formed at the end of 1999 their music is a mixing traditional percussions and modern sonorities (Didjéridoo, low, flutes, djembés…). Their musical universe is an infernal, rhythmic trance, the envoutant songs transports you in their profoundly tribal universe.

Great festival of Skabazac (Rodez (12)) to come:

Jean-Régis Pipistrelle par Joaquim

                                            Jean-Régis Pipistrelle (1923-1975)

 

Born on 1 november 1923 at Condom; his father was travestit at “Michou cabaret’s” and his mother was sell cannabis at the exit of schools. It’s the third in a span of triplets, the only no trisomic. After his father’s death in 1933( he was raped and tortured by the double of Mimie Mathy,  a doom history of theft string), Pipistrelle started studying painting in the school of Guantanamo sur Meurthre; since 1936 it’s returned because he was too dumb and had a taste for pop music.

 

In 1947, after a long depression, he decided to return to art and studying in the studio Picasso of Mulhouse, he discovered that paint with brushes is better. Rich of a certain technic, he opened his own school in 1955 and has among in this students: Framboisier, Bioman and the Captain Igloo; which will become three figures in art contemporary.

In 1960, he began a series of travels in his apartment, which will continue until 1968. After the discovery in 1962 of his bathroom, Pipistrelle turns to carving glove toilet; which will be the main source of his work. The récurant themes in the art of Jean-Régis are: bananas, cooked in a bain marie and moral abstraction wich prevents us from urinating against the wind blows.

1966 was the year of the recognition by his peers at the town hall of Condom, after his famous exhibition “Fuck where are the  Chocapic” to the gallery “winged bull” in Paris. Then a series of shoching events that dive into the memory of his father. Jean-Régis began his blue period in tribute to the old employer of his father; who did much to the Pipistrelle family.

In 1971, Jean-Régis had knowledge of Jesus Cri, an actor tacky illuminated, a notorious dealer, who leads slowly to the path of drugs. Pipistrelle is regulary shoot with “cordon bleu”( this drug leads to the appearance on the skin a layer of pannelure golden yellow, wich requires people to call you “Tweety”, leading the death with a strong dose of shame.)

On June 21, 1975; after a long lapse Jean-Régis dies in the arm of his mother( she’s got just only one, because she sell the other at a fan of chocolate, to meet the needs of her own). Pipistrelle leaves a work consisting of sculptures, paintings and pancakes; his masterpiece will no doubt sculpture ” woman without tits” made in 1964.

Jean-Régis Pipistrelle is, even today, remains misunderstood by art critics.

 

   ” woman without tits”, 1964

CULTURE DAY IN AVIGNON – “J’EMBRASSE PAS” // COLLECTION LAMBERT (lionel)

From the beginning of the month, I exhorted Elodie, Florent and Clément to go to Avignon before the 13^th of january because it was the last day of the exhibition entitled “J’embrasse pas”, at the Collection Lambert. The 12^th, we were on the road for the gallery…

 

This exhibition was suddenly organized after a tragedy that happened last summer in this place, the Collection Lambert, in Avignon. It was a terrible act of vandalism that has been committed on a picture by Cy Twombly. Useless to point out, as the Collection Lambert did all the same, that “Cy Twombly became a double victim : first because of a vulgar kiss planted on one of his paintings that was preserved in the museum ; second, because – as Twombly said with irony – his name will be now linked to the one who painted a white canvas, kissed by a woman who though she was an artist, taking Twombly hostage in a media and judicial scandal…”.

 

The piece concerned is named “The Three Dialogues of Plato” and was made in 1977. It was the first time the Collection Lambert could present this indivisible set composed of three diptychs “Plato“, “Republic“, “Symposium“, and a triptych, “Phaedrus“. To represent these oppositions between profane love and spiritual love, and between physical love and platonic love, Cy Twombly decided to combine two big white canvases of identical size. While the first one was spattered with a red-ochre-and-pink spurt (passion, sex, flesh, the interior of the body), the second one was totally white, immaculate (purity, virginity). It is this painting that was vandalized on July, 19^th because of the ignorance and the stupidity of a poor woman, narcissistic and simple-minded.

 

After this event, a lot of artists reacted immediately to indicate their indignation and to bring support, first by letters, and progressively, through propositions to show some pieces of their production that they thought might be considered a response to this scandal. They finally decided to create new works, especially for the exhibition. According to the Collection Lambert, “J’embrasse pas” sounds like a restriction, for example from the Ten Commandments, a ban that “will be posted as a notice in the entrance of every contemporary art museum, next to “I do not steal“, “I do not break“…”.

 

In spite of the context, I fully enjoyed the exhibition. I even saw 36 photographs from the collection “Cabinet of ” by Roni Horn !! I really like this series of clowns and for the first time I could appreciate them in real life… I find her work so close to Francis Bacon, and I love Francis Bacon !! Good point for her ! I also found some series by Nan Goldin and sometimes my emotion in front of her work cannot find the good limit between a photograph and the reality : of course she captures the straight even crude reality, and it is very hard to enter certain pictures, but she is also able to show the life of her friends with such intensity and poetry at the same time… Several works directly spoke about the kiss and made mouths, lips, red kisses intervene throughout the museum ; the others twisted these meanings, destroying the notion, even the act of kissing. For the latters, I retain in peculiar this video of Baptiste Croze, a student at Grenoble Fine Arts School : “Rougir” could be related with the works of Vito Acconci (body art in the 1970s) but with a few variations. Here Baptiste Croze uses a red lipstick as if he was using a brush or a pencil. As a painter, he covers his body with red (and not with kisses) but using his mouth as a tool. In this way, he totally destroys eroticism and sexual fantasy. It can be considered “a return to a more primitive painting, just like American Indian used to paint, according certain rituals, etc. Really good.

 

 

 

After the Collection Lambert, we decided to walk down the streets and we arrived in front of the Palais des Papes, The Popes’ Palace. This is a very beautiful monument and because of time we just visited the outside, but for sure the palace is home to some marvellous patrimonial pieces… For the next time ! The Popes’ Palace is the biggest Gothic Palace in the world, both a powerful fortress and a magnificient palace ; it was the seat of the Christian world in the 14^th century. This exceptional monument bears the mark of the nine popes who succeded one another, the most famous of whom were Benoît XII and Clément VI. I am rather eager to go back to Avignon to visit this Palace…

 

 

 

JAUME PLENSA // MAMAC, NICE (lionel)

I went to Nice with Elodie and Florent to visit the Museum of Modern Art and Contemporary Art. The exhibition of the moment was dedicated to Jaume Plensa, a contemporary artist who has been invited by the city of Nice to participate in the urban development around the new tramway. I really enjoyed the exhibition, both inside and outside…

Jaume Plensa is a Spanish artist, who was born in Barcelona in 1955, and who has been famous since the beginning of the 1980s thanks to his big cast-iron forms. He has lived and worked in Berlin, Brussels, the United Kingdom and France (invited by the Studio Alexandre Calder). He lives now between Barcelona and Paris. After several steps in his work, he created sculptures with glass, synthetic resin, light, sound, water, digital images and language. He is really an inventor of forms, that’s probably why he appears to be one of the most striking sculptors of his generation. Great exhibitions show his works and he has produced a number of monumental public pieces throughout the world (Europe, United States, Japan). In the city of Nice, he made an installation on the “place Masséna” : several statues light up and slowly change color, symbolizing the dialogue between the different communities of today’s society. The figures are elevated, they seem to keep a watchful eye on the passers-by, as if they could protect them.

In the MAMAC, we find the same figures, but made of different materials, and with different connotations. Some of them, in resin, are hunged on the walls and it is possible to read some lines on their light-colored bodies, arms, faces (Doors of Jerusalem I, II, III, 2006) ; whereas others are only made with soldered iron letters (Overflow, 2007), or represent the alchemy of the tree of life (Self Portrait with Tree, 2007). Regarding his work “as a sculptor” Jaume Plensa has said that he “especially works in the domain of the ideas, and not really with the matter nor the forms, even if each idea logically implies a material and a form, but here is not his first preoccupation“. He added during an interview last year : “letters and words became my materials now… the association of the letters like body cells can create words in more complex organisms ; and the words between them can form a text that, gathered with others, can write a culture“.

The Cathedral of Rodez by Florent L.

When i went to Rodez, a little city in the Aveyron region, i didn’t expect to discover, in the Cathedral of Rodez, contemporary art.

We had time to waste, so we went to the only monument to visit in that little city. At first, when you enter in it, the cathedral is like any other cathedrals: a big (and beautiful, i admit it) organ, an altar, some statues, old paintings, old giant columns etc… But if you take a look at the stained glass winodws, you’ll be very surprised: there’s no bible scenes, no old drawings with old colours and always the same boring scenes, but some modern, even contemporary stained glass windows. And it’s very beautiful. Some pannels allow us to understand it: in 2002 (i don’t know why and who decided it), a competition is thrown to renew the stained glass windows of the cathedral of Rodez, in 2003 the french artist Stéphane Belzère is chosen by the jury, against 44 other artists.
After having planned all the project, the parisian artist installs the first stained glass window in 2005. He finishes his work on november 2006.
Every stained glass window means something, linked with religion, of course. First, there’s the four elements: air, earth, fire and water, and some great religion subjetcs like resurrection, sacraments etc…

Heigth stained glass windows, and an other one, made by an other artist, representing war and poverty (it was less interesting, but there was some drawings made by the artist that were very beautiful).
I really liked this project, because at first i was surprised to see such a contrast between an old cathedral and those stained glass windows that were very astonishing, because of its lightness, its bright colours an the modernship of the drawings and themes. Also, i never liked visiting churches and cathedral (so boring!), but in this case, i loved it, because it was different, interesting, and beautiful. And i really like the mixing of old things and new things.

Alberto Giacometti by Florence

There was an exhibition in Aix en Provence for nearly three months, on the Cours Mirabeau.

This exhibition was devoted to Alberto Giacometti and his sculptures.

There were a lot of photography of his works, but a painting caught my attention.

It was a portrait of Jacques Dupin (1965), unfinished because he thought that he would continue when he got back from a sort of holiday, but he didn’t because he died before.
So this unfinished painting is very attractive because the eyes were finished, so you look in the center of the canvas and the eyes of Jacques Dupin go deeply immediately to your soul.

And you are deep in the contemplation of the canvas, you can stay like this for hours.

the painting is embraced you just because Giacometti wanted to recreate an atmosphere of contemplation between the painting and spectators.

Giacometti began always with the eyes of his models, then he painted the rest of the face.

That’s why this portrait is very fascinated…

Gamer 02

Here is a small article about the Gamerz 02 exhibition:

First, Antonin Fournaud and Manuel Braun’s Patch&KO, a mod of Street Fight II introducing a control device where you must loose control to be able to play. The device is basically an hybrid between a bean game, a Pachniko and a marble machine using iron balls in a pin field making electric contacts. Each contact may be transformed in an action (like hit, jump, etc.). Here is a video showing it in action:

Servovalve presented a “worm” version of Carbone: a software that copies an image (a face to be precise) in a random mode.

Damien Aspe built a real and colorful Tetris wall called From Russia with fun:

Guillaume Stagnaro presented a piece called XOX, two robots playing programmed to never loose and never win. In this situation, the only way to win is not to play.

Grégoire Lauvin presented Weith Contest, a multiplayer music game where the gameplay is based on weight. The heaviest measure plays the sample.

Pierrick Thébault (from L16) made a cool hack from CyWorld making a porn version called CyPorn.

The night finished with a live musical performance by Confipop and Sidabitball using Game Boys as instrument to generate sounds and images.

More information about the works presented here and the ones I didn’t mention here.

By: Benoit Espinola

Subliminal messages by Floriane

” A subliminal message is a signal or message embedded in another object, designed to pass below the normal limits of perception. These messages are indiscernible by the conscious mind, but in certain situations can affect the subconscious or deeper mind and later actions or attitudes.
Subliminal techniques have occasionally been used in advertising and propaganda; “

They can be incorporated in a soundtrack or a video sequence. For instance, in a film, if we replace one of the pictures with a picture which has nothing to do with the film, this one will be shown only 0,04 seconds (there are 24 pictures a second in the cinema).

What interested me in this idea of subliminal messages, is first that purpose, effectiveness and frequency of the application of such techniques are debated.
It’s been proved that subliminal messages were introduced into many films, TV guides or advertising. But do they have a real influence on the spectator?
That remains to be proved, despite several experiments which have been made on this subject.

But, on second thought, the most important thing is not to know if subliminal messages actually work or not. What is the most worrying is to know that power and advertising try to influence our will in our subconscious, with this means, or others even more effective.

And that is what I would like to denounce. It has never been proved that subliminal message work on people’s brains, in spite of many more or less serious experiments.
But on the other hand, the powers of many countries forbade the broadcasting of subliminal messages in television advertising, because it was not in accordance with their ethics, but particularly because this phenomenon made the population realize that it could be manipulated without being conscious.

Indeed, advertising executive rarely use this technique, but “artistic movements” still use these subliminal messages, for fun, as in Walt Disney‘s “Bernard and Bianca” where a picture of a naked woman’s body in window appears in one of the scenes, in the background. Sometimes they are used to provoke, as in Led Zeppelin’s “stairway to heaven” where we hear various messages when we play the soundtrack back to front. Sometimes the aim is to denounce this phenomenon, as in David Fincher’s “Fight Club” where the technique is used as setup in this fiction.

This is what I would like to do too in a video project: I would like to introduce subliminal messages video editing, to observe for myself if it can have an effect, – -even small- on the spectator.
That’s why I had the idea to use soft and restful pictures of babies in a video editing of a stressful and disturbing film, (Requiem for a dream). The idea is to reassure someone watching the passage.

But I also want to make these pictures appear to the public, little by little, to reveal to the spectator that there are many things which happened without their realizing it (and which more or less manipulates their mind).
Indeed, by showing the pictures more and more clearly, they will realize that they were there from the beginning of the projection, even though they did not notice them, which is what often happens in the media or in politics, by various means (not necessarily with subliminal messages, but by manipulation of the subconscious).

To find more explanations about subliminal messages, or about the various experiments using them over the years, you can consult this site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_message