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Tuesday , November 11, 2008
Random Picture Entry: Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois is my hero for a lot of reasons. There's her work as an artist -- a highly varied milieu of sculpture, drawing, installation and painting that is surreal, mischievous, audacious, personal and oddly secretive in its form and content. There's the fact that she's been making art for so long -- she had her first exhibition in 1947 and worked in relative obscurity through the 50s and 60s until achieving mainstream success in the 1970s. And at age 96, she's still making work, some of which was recently shown at her full-career retrospective at the Guggenheim here in New York this fall. (If still making interesting work as a nonagenarian isn't awesome and awe-inspiring, I have no idea what is.)
It was great seeing her monumental sculpture work as part of the Guggenheim exhibition -- she was one of the few female sculptors working in such 'dude' materials as bronze and marble for awhile, using them to render these strangely sexy biomorphic forms -- but I never fully appreciated her connection to textiles till the Guggenheim exhibition. She grew up in a family of tapestry makers, and because her work is so much about personal memory, clothes play a prominent role in a lot of her installation work. (She's also returned to working with fabric in her latest creations as a result of her advanced years -- she made the best lil' baby spider sculpture out of tapestry fabrics!) I've been really intrigued and inspired by these vintage clothes -- careworn muslims, touches of handmade lace, a very 1940s sense of delicacy and propriety. It's both sober, yet very beautiful in its simplicity -- the same of which can be said about pictures of the young Bourgeois herself. Check my newest fashion inspiration:
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Saturday , October 11, 2008
To Go: "Beautifully Worn" Fashion Photo Show, Opening Reception Oct. 15, 2008
The rock keeps on rolling at nogoodforme.com. No sooner than we recovered from the bliztkrieg of fun known as Spirit Animal House than we got on the proverbial ball to curate and organize our very first art show! We are super-stoked and very proud to announce that BEAUTIFULLY WORN is going up next Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at NYC boutique Clarabella. And we graciously invite all of you lovely people to come to the opening reception that very same day from 6-9pm, where there will be refreshments and two of the nogoodforme troika in attendance! We are truly amped to show you all the photos we collected from various good souls who sent in images and words responding to our question "What do you love to wear?" The results will charm the pants off of you, we guarantee it. If you can't make the opening, the show will continue to grace Clarabella's walls until November 30, when we take down the photos and the apocalypse comes. Or something like that.
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Tags: art, Beautifully Worn, invitation, opening reception
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Monday , September 22, 2008
Love, Love, Love: Gunta Stolzl Tapestries/The Textile Blog
Dude! I have been waiting impatiently for good-quality images of Gunta Stolzl's tapestries to make their way onto the Internet since I first found out she existed, which occurred at approximately 9:30 in the morning sometime during the spring of 2005. I remember this because it happened when I took a Feminist Art & Design elective at Parsons School of Design, and you, or I, can never forget which classes began at 9 AM- so many memories! Running out the door in pyjamas and unbrushed teeth; sleeping through Powerpoint presentations; waking up at dawn to finish term papers; etc. FA&D was one of maybe four classes I took over the course of my entire career as a Parsons student that wasn't completely corrupt Normie white-kkkollar garbage. Whoopsie daisies! WHY DID I NOT MAJOR IN BURNING DOWN CHURCHES??
In addition to being a Bavarian-born Pisces, Gunta Stolzl was most notably the Bauhaus' weaving master. Something I learned a lot about in Feminist Art & Design is how the Bauhaus was totally fuckedly sexist for pretty much forcing its female students to be weaving/textiles majors. Obviously yes, I grasp why this was messed-up, but seriously? The girls won in the end. Gunta Stolzl was ten trillion times the genius that dumbass Walter "I Heart the Patriarchy" Gropius was, I mean, wasn't.
The textiles seen above were created between the years 1926 and 1927, and are uncannily proto-psychedelic! Gunta Stolzl should have designed record covers for the Great! Society (or maybe Blood is the New Black t-shirts HA HA HA). I really wish I could resurrect Gunta Stolzl and make her design my entire life (right down to the toothbrushes!); I also wish that little girls were encouraged to decorate their seven-year-old bedrooms in fabrics and fibers that look like those pictured above as opposed to polyester Unicorn Fairy Barbie bedspreads and Bratz-brand plastic makeup mirrors. Oh, well. If I don't let these things go, they will destroy me.
It is very important to note that these images were grabbed from The Textile Blog, my third-favorite blog on the entire Internet after nogoodforme.com and Emily's Tumblr. It is one of the most intelligent, informative and (SCORE!!!) frequently-updated blogs around this town (this town= the entire Internet); I personally check it so much that I often get paranoid that the dude who runs it checks out his sitetracker and thinks, "This girl from Toronto should probably expand her blogospheric horizons instead of consistently checking mine fifty times daily." It is also thanks to The Textile Blog that my UFC Updates look so fly every week. Almost every single background image is ripped from The Textile Blog.
PS: The Textile Blog has an even more comprehensive Flickr page which is like the Dylan's Candy Bar of textiles.
PPS: One last thing on the Gunta Stolzl tip: she was Anni Albers' mentor. Anni Albers is my favorite person of all time who wasn't in the Beatles: SEE?????
Tags: Anni Albers, Bauhaus, girl-positive, Gunta Stolzl, I hate school, textiles, The Textile Blog
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Saturday , September 20, 2008
Don't Forget: Submit to Our "Beautifully Worn" Photo Show
Beautiful procrastinators, don't forget to submit to our photo show, "Beautifully Worn," which will be on show at Clarabella later this fall! We've gotten totally great submissions so far, ranging from band t-shirts to couture dresses to everything in between and from all over the world. We've gotten simple snapshots to beautifully art-directed photo shoots. The diversity and all the little stories have been remarkable -- and yes, we want more! So please do submit, and if you can't make the date, please let us know you're interested so we can keep an eye out for you.
More info: http://www.nogoodforme.com/artshow
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by Kat in Announcements
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Sunday , September 7, 2008
Love: Sarah Wilmer & Felix-Gabriel Smith & Sarajo Frieden I'm not sure if you've noticed or not, but guess what? On September 9th, nogoodforme.com is hosting a party called Spirit Animal House. Over the course of the past week of my life, I have had precisely one non-Spirit Animal House-related thought- it was, "I wonder if it's true that sometimes Venus Williams purposely loses tennis matches to Serena because of weird psychological sibling business." But besides that time I thought that about the Williams sisters, nope, sorry: in the wild world of Inside Laura Jane's Head, it's Spirit Animal House or nothin'. Luckily for me, SPIRIT ANIMAL HOUSE is the coolest thing that ever happened in the history of time, and there is heaps and tons and dollops and bounds and miles (and etc.) of awesome stuff to think about. One thing I used to think about in my pre-Spirit Animal House existence was art. In my new life, I think about art as it relates to Spirit Animal House. Which is highly preferable to no art at all! All you awesome people (to whom I owe my firstborn child) who will be attending The Actual Event have a shot at winning what I like to call The nogoodforme.com Ready-made Art collection. If you're anything like me at all, you aspire to one day actually own real art. If you're anything like me at all, you are too broke to afford even a piece of the crappy Mom-style art they sell at suburban non-art galleries. You know, watercolors of cottages and things like that. If you're anything like me at all, you are attending Spirit Animal House and will be purchasing several raffle tickets, which cost less than the price of ONE DRINK. And, if you're anything like me at all, you are presently hoping to high heaven that your raffle ticket may pay off into winning some cheap, brilliant, hot CONTEMPORARY ART. At left, you will see an absolutely gorgeous and appropriately animal-themed photograph taken by Sarah Wilmer, a Brooklyn-based music, fashion and fine art photographer who once took pictures of me dressed up as Claudia Kishi. Sarah's work, though diverse, is tied together by a fantastically spooky, haunted mansion-y aesthetic and a lot of expertly-accessed shadows and darkness. We are highly stoked that Los Angeles-based illustrator Sarajo Frieden was able to contribute one of her Burning Dresser linopresses (seen at right), which I have coveted for a long, long year (ever since seeing it on the ReForm School website, upon which I Imaginary Shopping Spree thrice-weekly, or maybe septa-weekly). I love this print because it balances scrappiness and elegance with a level of panache I could only dream of. A lot of Sarajo's work looks like textiles, and probably should be, and probably will be. Last but not certainly not least is an original contempo-psychedelic (I just made that term up!) illustration (seen above) by Felix-Gabriel Smith, who is totally going places and has some of the best dude style I've ever seen in my life (just so you know). Gabriel's work sort of looks like the cover of Odessey and Oracle by the Zombies collided with Galaga and a meteorologist's e-mail inbox. And of course, our Internet-only prizes are still available for your acquisitional purposes, and you can do so by clicking the handy-dandy Paypal button below. Have a lovely Spirit Animal House! Oops, I mean day.
Tags: art, Felix-Gabriel Smith, my brain, raffle prizes, raffle tickets, Sarah Wilmer, Sarajo Frieden, Serena WIlliams, Spirit Animal House, Venus Williams
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Saturday , August 16, 2008
Random Picture Entry: Helen Frankenthaler If you are boring and/or annoying and/or misogynistic, you would most likely describe Helen Frankenthaler as being "the female Jackson Pollock". Maybe one day the scummy dregs of our patriarchal hellhole of a society will figure out a way to categorize the work of female artists that isn't simply naming the male artist whose work theirs most resembles and then sticking "the female" in front of it. Probably not, but maybe. Helen Frankenthaler is my favorite artist; please bear in mind that I didn't just say "Helen Frankenthaler is my favorite female artist," a sentence I have actually heard spoken verbatim (sadly enough). I am neither an art historian or an art critic and therefore have decided that the onus to explain why I respond to her work with any degree of clarity is completely off me; conveniently enough, my core attraction to what she does can best be summed up by a quote from Frankenthaler herself: A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it--well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that--there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute. Good point, Helen. Oh yeah, and the cherry on top of all the Helen Frankenthaler awesomeness is that she's a total Style Icon to boot: Untitled, 1961 (oil and coloured crayons on paper) Other Generations, 1957 (oil on canvas)
Tags: abstract expressionism, art, Colour Fields, damn the man, down with the patriarchy, Helen Frankenthaler, hella conceptual, Jackson Pollock, misogyny sucks
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Wednesday , July 16, 2008
Random Picture Entry: Flora by Schiele
Egon Schiele was an eerily talented person. He died of the Spanish Flu when he was a mere twenty-eight years old; considering the vehement devotion to morbidity demonstrated by his body of work, this early death was thematically in keeping with his creative output, which I guess is an optimistic way to frame a rather obvious tragedy. Flu epidemics are such a downer, man! (FYI: Plagues can also be classified as "major buzzkills")
Unfortunately for people who care about art, Egon Schiele's aesthetic has been thoroughly ripped off and co-opted by every contemporary illustrator that I hate, imbuing his macabre, cadaverous style of portraiture with heroin-chic vapidity and pro-ana overtones, which makes me want to puke and punch people. It sucks that I will always like Egon Schiele a little bit less because of these losers; more imporantly, however, it REALLY sucks that Egon Schiele never got to develop to his full capacity, because I am quite confident that his full capacity would have been revolutionary as all freaking get out.
Recently I have discovered Egon Schiele's studies of trees, forestry, flowers, et al, which are heavy-chestedly beautiful in a gloomy, black magic way. They remind me of days when it is overcast and crappy out, but you're in such a shit-hell-death mood that you are able to bask in the beauty of bare branches and sunlessness the same way you do all chipper and abuzz in the summertime.
Rest in ugly, excruciating, black cat anti-peace, Egon Schiele.
(left: Autumn Sun 1 (Herbstbaum), 1912; right: Autumn Trees with Fuschias, 1909)
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Tags: anti-plague sentiment, arboriculture, art, Egon Schiele, I hate my generation
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Saturday , June 28, 2008
Random Picture Entry: John Delk's BANG
I hate art.
That's a lie. I actually love art. I just hate most art. And even more than I hate most art, I hate how in 2008, every single person I know, kind of know, don't know, and never will know, is an artist. Based on my limited understanding of what the semi-recent past was like, it seems as though in the beat-centric 1950s, every stupid loser in town decided that the best way to prove their (non-) coolness to the world was by writing poetry.Then the Beatles hit the scene, rock music took on the role of Almighty Coolest, and the crappy losers of that generation decided to form crappy bands as their primary means of crappy self-expression. This standard stayed pretty much the same into the 1990s, but then, in 1999, something really horrible happened: Will Smith released a single called "WILL2K," and in doing so, killed pop music forever. That's where it all went wrong, in case you were wondering. "WILL2K" came out, and then it was just done. Pop music was officially overfarmed and beyond reproach. Now, pop music is so lame that even the world's hugest losers can figure out how lame it is! So, in 2008, if you want to communicate your obnoxious awesomeness to the world/East Williamsburg/[insert your peer group here], there is only one way left to do it:
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Tags: art, damn the man, get off meds, I hate my generation, John Delk, Laura loves The Beatles, what is art?, Will2K
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