And the band played on

With that foot wedged up in there, resisting the drum kit’s urge to crowdsurf.

[pix by imagineering]

Work it girl, liven up that public sculpture

Public sculpture with interpretive dance by Raquel Welch and some spacemen. The site is the Ruta de la Amistad sculpture project from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Watch the clip here.

[all pix screengrabs from the youtube clip]

Resistance and the culture of performance

“Pedal-powered Buick displeases Canadian cops.”

[pix by imagineering, thanks to mike for the buick link]

Floating

For carnival anything can be and is attached to wheels and pushed, pulled or dragged into town. Today I saw an football team and cheerleaders about 4 kilometers outside of the city center. They were pushing a sound-system (which was fully operational) the size of a volkswagen bug along the side of the road. When I passed by again forty minutes later, they’d only moved a few hundred metres.

The little-known NASA “Recovery” pictured here on a mission with hamburger fixings and a waffle maker; the official parade; mixed-myths of the American frontier all saddled up; the Chinese Olympic Ping Pong Team 2008, with table; and a portable laundry.

[pix by imagineering]

Various costumes

In this spirit, see Zach Galifianakis “On Physical Comedy.”

[pix by imagineering]

Costumes for buildings and people

Preparations for the carnival next week intensify.

[pix by imagineering]

In the news (literally)

Ztohoven: this Czech art collective spliced a mushroom cloud into a live television news broadcast. You can see the footage on youtube here. The Guardian reports that “the artists sent shock waves through the Czech Republic in June last year by splicing footage of [an] atomic explosion into a live panoramic shot of the Krkonose mountains, in north-east Bohemia.” And now they’re going to jail, for, in part, “penetrating public space.”

Newsbreakers: a multi-cell group of media activists who physically infliltrate local news TV broadcasts. One member of the team monitors the live TV programming, while speaking to other members of the team on-location via cell phone, directing them into and out of the live broadcast shot. They record video from the perspective of each member of the team, plus the TV footage, and post the compilation on their website. In my favorite clip, the “cheese ninja”, a Newsbreaker dressed as a ninja stands in the background behind a reporter while whizzing slices of processed cheese toward the camera. Original video here.

Miami under cover of darkness

Iggy Pop fans storm stage. The shirtless, ageless, go-go wonder is prancing at left during his concert on the beach for the opening of Art Basel.

We prepare for the next day with a run to Price Choice Food Markets.

[pix by imagineering]

Wave

Against all odds, I attended a Justin Timberlake show last night. Wow, animatronic robots look so real! Their voices still need a little tweaking though. Yeah, it was a pretty amazing level of flat spectacle.

The funniest bit was the end when he sang a slow song and made a mushy speech, and then said to the assembled crowd of 16,000 “now wave your cellphones.” Big generational step from a sea of lighters. But it seems like getting 16,000 cellphones in a room and in the air at the same time should be able to produce something more than just a spangly user-generated lightshow.

Mexican trannie bar

Cindy Sherman vs. T-Shirt Ninjas

I love this post by Tom Moody: he compares Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills with web cam shots of T-Shirt Ninjas. That’s 1979 vs 2002. Well played, Mr. Moody, this is a great pairing. I just realized that I actually spent more time looking at the ninjas.

There is a free-form use of text in the ninja pix that is almost like folk art. Even the most flippant text in contemporary art feels heavy in comparison, loaded with significance.

The ninjas are borrowing from print and television marketing models, which almost always have text together with imagery. The ninjas naturally include their own strap lines and slogans. Their pictures are participatory advertisements, not film stills. Maybe this subtly suggests a blurring: to communicate is now to publicize.

p.s. See Tom’s reply to the above post here. I’m still thinking, expect more smack soon.

Dirty jennies

This is the scene at seven in the morning in the main square of Aalst, Belgium, after the third day of the annual carnival. The town is entirely boarded up – trees and shop-fronts boxed in with plywood – in preparation for the “dirty jennies.” These are men dressed in some weird interpretation of women; cartoon hosiery, skirts and wigs, makeup, all noise. It’s like an inversion of Mardi Gras, with the men as women, wearing fake plastic strap-on tits and heels. It doesn’t really work in reverse, there isn’t a spectacle of women dressed as men. Instead the sight of women dressed like their dates – also made-up in this strange fiction of feminity – is so much more loaded. This last morning is definitely my favorite moment: the post-apocalypse, the historical square in lurid ruins; the energy of the night before spent, in piles of trash and furniture on the streets, and the momentum inverting as the bulldozers and cleaning crews swept through, putting out the fires.

Floatzilla

Photos by G.Whaley & Ed Lofquist (top), and Brad Stevens (bottom). Originals here and here.

Fromthearchives: Car Porn

Earlier this year designer Bernadette Deddens created the Car Cover Car Lover, and she asked me to photograph the project. The car cover is specially designed for a classic Porchse 911T, and fits like lingerie. It’s removal, piece by piece via the seductive straps and fittings, is a striptease. For the photo shoot we enlisted the acting skills of the superb Anthony Styles. The pictures were published in the October 2006 issue of Intersection magazine.