Tense testing

TESCO

Core Purpose

To create value for customers to earn their lifetime loyalty

Values:

No one tries harder for customers
Treat people how we like to be treated

- Cashier computer screensaver at Tesco, Bernard St. London WC1, 5 April 2011

4411

Spammer Lauren Payne sent me some great advice today, 4 April 2011:


It made me think: What should I use my coal for?

I need something that'll 'actually work', after all.

What do you do with yours?

Home truths

"Can't be bothered with this."

- Overheard on Saturday 19 February 2011 in the Tate Britain's Contemporary Acquisitions gallery (Supported by BP), where the 'Gerard Byrne: 1984 and Beyond' exhibition was held

No shit

From the Moschino Cheap & Chic Autumn/Winter 2011-12 show, Milano.

"Capitalism's Terminal Crisis"

Norwegian model Kat Hessen is the role model of the future.


At the Marc by Marc Jacobs Autumn/Winter 2011-12 show in New York City all is explained.

Before:


After:

Behold! Capitalism's Terminal Crisis is inside us. As Kat teaches us, what choice do we have but to carry on in the face of adversity?

"Damien Hirst's Diamond Skull on view in Florence at Palazzo Vecchio"

"The work stands in the great tradition of the 'Memento Mori', where an image or an object serves to remind us of our mortality," professes the Palazzo Vecchio press release (via e-flux bulletin), which also calls Hirst's For the Love of God a "tour de force".


In the future will archaeologists dig up this old relic and finally understand why the age of capitalism annihilated human life as we know it?

"They were so obsessed with status symbols that they were encrusting their own skulls with diamonds," they'll say, "no wonder they all got blown up in their own nuclear waste, they couldn't see past the shiny lights of their own craniums."

Paris weather updates from Deborah via Skype

29.11.2010


05.01.2011

moonmessage010110 is over (Part IV)

The time has passed. I would say largely that it didn't work. Glad to be free of it. Finding new ways in 2011.

[FYI: Part I, Part II, Part III]

Thank you to Roi and Sarah.

Chirac trio

(Mignon.)
Chirac trio (Clinton, Putin, Bush), 2010
Found images

11% (etc.)

Click pic for link.

Matt on the Catt / Catt on the Matt

"We found a cat meme collage circulating online, and we ended up making this fake sculpture by art-star Maurizio Cattelan with it...The reception by the art world has been enthusiastic so far." - Eva and Franco Mattes


"In spite of an immediate and enthusiastic reception by the art world, a new sculpture by Italian art-star Maurizio Cattelan currently featured at Inman Gallery Annex in Houston, TX, is actually the work of artist-provocateurs Eva and Franco Mattes—also know as 0100101110101101.org—created by adopting the famous artist’s style and materials." - Inman Gallery


"“He’s a genius,” wrote Jonathan Line on Facebook. “He is the only one able to surprise me every time.”"

∴

"Art-Star" Catt ≈ "Artist-Provocateur" Matt

IELAND

ICELAND / IRELAND

And so it arrives ...

Today, Wednesday 8 December 2010, the term postdemocracy arrived in my world, officially.

First, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.org is arrested and refused bail supposedly because he is a sexual predator but EVERYONE KNOWS IT'S REALLY BECAUSE THE WORLD IS SHITTING ITSELF THAT THEIR PRECIOUS LIES ARE GONNA GET EXPOSED !!!!! (Since when does any judge/government care if a woman argues that a man refused to wear a condom????)

Second, Hito Steyerl writes this brilliant account, kind of summing up exactly how I feel about, like, everything (but especially 'art'): e-flux.com/journal/view/181

Ha!

noreply@artandaustralia.com.au

Australia’s longest-running art journal Art & Australia has become the site for the latest project of international artist John Baldessari. The recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale and the subject of a major retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Baldessari, 79, chose to collaborate exclusively with Art & Australia on the eve of his January project for the 2011 Sydney Festival and Kaldor Public Art Projects, ‘Your Name in Lights’.

For Art & Australia's Summer 2010 issue, Baldessari was given creative freedom to reinvent the magazine’s traditional square format cover. In a playful response to the issue’s theme of sculpture, the artist offers a photo collage of a hand grasping a spider. And for the first time in its 47-year history, Art & Australia's logo has been replaced – with Baldessari’s signature handwriting.

‘It is thrilling to collaborate with John Baldessari,’ says Art & Australia's Publisher/Editor Eleonora Triguboff. ‘He is an artist who constantly pushes the boundaries, and through partnerships such as these Art & Australia continues to reinvent itself as a magazine.’

Art & Australia's Baldessari commission is the latest in an ongoing series of artist projects which have seen celebrated artists such as William Kentridge, Del Kathryn Barton and Louise Weaver use the magazine’s cover as their canvas.

The Baldessari cover commission accompanies an extensive interview with the artist by Art & Australia's Managing Editor Michael Fitzgerald, who writes: ‘His importance as an artist and as a teacher cannot be separated, and nor can the categories of painting, photography, performance and video which he has helped relax over the last half century or so.’

Joining Baldessari in this Summer issue of Art & Australia is an international who’s who of contemporary art, with featured artists including Christian Boltanski, James Turrell, Clement Meadmore, Paul Selwood, Peter Robinson and Louise Bourgeois. Also commemorating the Baldessari cover commission is a limited-edition poster print, available for purchase as part of Art & Australia's ongoing series of artist editions. It coincides with ‘Your Name in Lights’ – a major commission by Sydney Festival and Kaldor Public Art Projects that will see the names of 115,000 Sydneysiders projected onto the Australian Museum facade in January 2011.



[The above text was copy/pasted from a recent email from Art & Australia magazine titled "For Immediate Release: Baldessari creates special cover for Art & Australia", 1 December 2010. All bold, italicised and underlined words rendered so by me.]

CONSUMPTION

In 1973 Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman made Television Delivers People.

Who delivers your news?
Who owns your news?
Who owns the internet? (Does the Internet provide for us or do we provide for it?)
Who delivers you?

Found via TheImagist.com

Albers to Artschwager ...

Whilst browsing Tate Liverpool's 'Works on Display' section I encounter subconscious Internet poetry.

"booth concepts"

VOLTA says via e-flux:

This bold curatorial emphasis will set a path for VOLTA's future to remain always on the forefront of new ideas.

Exhibiting galleries for VOLTA7 2011 will be selected by a Curatorial Committee composed of art critics and curators of an international pedigree. These include:

Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, São Paolo
Christoph Doswald, Zürich
Jasper Sharp, Vienna
Francesco Stocchi, Rome


Sure, babes.

P.S. Whoa! : http://ny.voltashow.com/Internship-Program.5732.0.html $150 per day! Man, that's really good! $$$chi-ching$$$ ... Do it!

It happened suddenly

Moonmessage Part III

Approximately seventeen days after posting this and approximately seven days after posting this, I received this beautiful text from writer and musician Roi Cydulkin:


Connect with Roi on the interwebs via Beige.

Merci, Roi.

Via EL PAÍS.com, I find Parship ...

Bermused, I conduct an interview with myself:

What do websites like Parship offer us?
I guess they give people the opportunity to find love/companionship. I know of many people who have met lovers online, I don't think there is a problem with online-dating per se, but Parship seems to frame it in a strange way, they offer 'professional dating for professional people'.

What does that mean?
I guess it means Parship is for people who don't have time to meet non-professional people, people outside a professional context, or are not interested in non-professional people because they themselves are always working? I don't think we should criticise such people: the reality of the situation is that everyone must work a lot, the majority of their time in fact, to function in this system. Most people have to be 'professional' to exist in this society so maybe that is Parship's angle?

It sounds like you're saying that because most people are 'professional' they have trouble dating/finding a relationship?
I think the issue is the dynamic that emerges when people become automated in a society where work and money are the only value systems. There are two issues here, one being the need for "stable", legitimate, traditional relationships to maintain the economy (i.e. to create heterosexual, monogamous, nuclear families where the woman labours for free [this is simplistic, and arguably passé, but still holds on a fundamental level]). The other being the alienation that people feel not only in their work situations but - because work permeates almost every facet of life - in day-to-day/social/extra-curricular situations as well. Thus there is a collision of people feeling unable to relate to others, combined with the external expectation that states we are only legitimate subjects if coupled.

That's very complicated! Is it simply a question of lack of time these days?
Apparently Parship is 'based on 30 years of scientific research', so it would suggest they've been onto this 'problem' for a while. I would say it's more a sign of the demise of the backbone of capital (nuclear family myth) trying to cover up it's demise with yet another capitalist venture (this is the raison d'être of Capitalism and also why it's so difficult to eliminate - Capitalism reacts rapidly to every change in circumstance, it's a shape-shifter). And anyway, people have time to be on Parship so they have time not to be on Parship, I think it's just a step further in current society's assertion that we are too time-pressed to know ourselves, understand ourselves, and meet others (which I think need not necessarily be in the construct of a "Relationship") who may complement that self.

Are you saying value in the eyes of society only stems from recognition of traditional couple-status?
It's extremely simplistic but, in a word, yes. Those who don't fit into that structure are seen as (for men) either "dirty old men"/womaniser-bachelors or (for women) spinsters/promiscuous hussies. These people are really made into an Other in society's eyes. Some people may disagree, but even homosexual relationships are now being 'accepted' only if they fit into the heterosexual, capitalist model of monogamy (i.e. gay marriage, which needless to say I support despite its paradoxical nature).

Are you crazy? Why are you so cynical and negative?
I'm not negative! I'd say that I'm an optimistic cynic! I'm really still trying to get my head around all of this. But I believe we need to be aware of the structures that surround us so we can fully comprehend where we're at and realise that we can work together to end alienation and establish real community and really fulfilling relationships with ourselves and others!

Hippy.
Your mum is.

frieze e-newsletter says ...

Espousing Art/Education/Freedom for all is a method taken by the few to sell magazine advertising, "save the arts", maintain sponsorship from freedom-for-all promoters like Deutsche Bank, et al.

I guess this is the only way today? Artists Space welcomes The James ...

[Please click the pics]


"While before, luxury had been constrained by excess and empty ostentation, The James has evolved the concept to accommodate the more enlightened values and aesthetics of today's culturally minded traveler."



When self-reflexion is commodified
When self-criticism serves capitalism
Self-critique is no longer critical

"Progress" (Moonmessage Part II)

I posted this the other day and so far have received three responses.

2 x email:

1 x conversation:
With Sarah.

RADIOACTIVITY / ELECTRICITY

Coincidental listening/learning.

Politics ≈ friendly chat over the hearth

(Reagan and Gorbatchev via Wiki)

moonmessage010110@gmail.com (Part I)

Email me your news and stories so that we can start a dialogue/email performance to be then played live at an event we will make together in 'real life' and real space, as opposed to virtual space but real time. The key idea would be to exchange ideas and stances. To arrive at a position communally, even in dissonance. Think of it as durational. Online time spent together but separate - connexion but dislocation - what is that space in between?

EMAIL ME: moonmessage010110@gmail.com

rodin.jpg

Quotidian pain

A, Bruxelles, C, D, E, F, Genève, H, I, J, K, London, München, New York, O, Paris, Q, R, Sydney, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Zürich