December 2021

horseshoe crabs - tags

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Horseshoe_Crabs_650w

Photo from The Verge, showing horseshoe crabs being milked for their blood, used for testing, by "American biomedical companies." Hundreds of thousands of crabs -- beautiful "living fossils" -- are captured and bled in this fashion, endangering the species.

Possible tags:

Nazi science
Reptilians
Death cult
Demonic
Exploitation
Gaia
Capitalist leeches
Life out of balance
Unethical
Frankenscience
End times
Big pharma excess
Angry mob
White collar crime
Executive punishment
Horror movie
Factory farm
Biodiversity loss
Bad karma
"Saving human lives" (for profit)

the technobabble happens here (part 2)

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We've made fun of the hyper-punctuated technospeak of this tweet by Lozana_Rossenova:

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In terms of verbal communication, someone who grew up learning English in the classical sense might have no idea what any of the above meant. Also, what is a "PhD w/ Rhizome?" Is Rhizome.org now "accredited" is that just some fun thing? Must have missed this somewhere.

The tweet also comes up mysteriously short in the visual department. Those familiar with MTAA's decades-old "The Art Happens Here" cartoon know that the image was a blinking animated GIF (the lightning bolt trembled). You can't upload those to Twitter -- Twitter converts them to video -- but Rossenova didn't take that step; it was simply rendered as a flat .png. So much for net-art-as-inspiration (&more!). Worse, what is that swirly stuff surrounding MTAA's rectangle? Apparently it was one of a series of ambient backgrounds uploaded to Rhizome's server by an ad agency that did Rhizome's last design. It's basically decorative fluff and has no business being attached to "art" -- imagine a show of 1960s conceptualism at the Metropolitan Museum with Rainbow Brite patterns instead of white walls. So much for "designing archival interactions" and "interface transparency" (again, whatever those might be).

John Pomara exhibition in Marfa

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poolparty7a_500w

John Pomara, Pool Party #7, 2021, oil and mixed medium on aluminum panel
15 x 11 inches

 

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John Pomara, Pool Party #2, 2021, oil and mixed medium on aluminum panel
15 x 11 inches

 

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John Pomara, Pool Party #31, 2021, oil and mixed medium on aluminum panel
15 x 11 inches

This new work of Dallas-based painter John Pomara's presents a departure, or deviation, from his exhibition a year ago titled Digital Debris. That show was part of Pomara's long-running dialogue with the trappings of digital culture: pixelation, display errors, questions about what is being communicated, using painting to investigate non-painting.

These Marfa works have physical similarities: the paint is applied to a metal (aluminum) surface and the top layer is glossy. The processes between are pure analog, however.
Per the gallery: "[U]nlikely combinations of oil paint and other additives to react with one another.. as fluid properties of the paint repel or attract... As these episodic reactions occur, the unpredictable activity is mediated to a great degree by the artist’s observation of the entropic aspect of this process. Pomara thus allows his 'laboratory' to be inundated with wildly out of control colors, surfaces, and improbable combinations..."

Tom here: the Marfa group provides an intriguing sidebar to Pomara's work -- a detour back into analog and also into The Monochrome, which has its own tradition and associations within abstract painting. It will be interesting to see how or if this direction loops back into ongoing digital discussion.

Opened December 10, 2021 at:
Eugene Binder
218 North Highland Ave.
Marfa, TX
eugenebinderart@gmail.com

reading list

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Blue Moon, Lee Child
Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis
The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, The Prairie James Fenimore Cooper
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis
The Philosopher's Stone, Colin Wilson
Blood & Thunder, Mark Finn (Robert E. Howard bio)
Renegades & Rogues, Todd B. Vick (Robert E. Howard bio)
Invisible Sun, Charles Stross
The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford
The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, Robert E. Howard
The Tremor of Forgery, Patricia Highsmith
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
Whatever, Michel Houellebecq