Design / Process & Outcome: December 2007

Christmas Ad

Never underestimate the power of adorability!

Explosion

A classic idea/technique that never seems to get stale:

Surreal but Real

From Metropolis, "It’s often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs are real. They look uncannily like hyperdetailed models, absent the imperfections of reality. Streets are strangely clean, trees look plastic, and odd distortions of scale create the opposite effect of what we expect from aerial photography—a complete overview, like military surveillance."

"I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything," Barbieri says. "After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again." He achieves the distinctive look by photographing from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens—a method, he says, that "allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don’t read [it as an] image but one line at a time."

Although I do not readily participate in outdoor/nature type excursions in my life, I do sincerely appreciate natural surroundings, especially ones that are real but surreal.

Shock Art

I have been struggling with the meaning of art lately. In my opinion, art really should stimulate your senses and provoke, perhaps, a discussion about our culture, traditions, morality, habits and being. However, where do we draw the line? When does artistic expression become vile, offensive and disrespectful? And when does its shocking qualities start to convolute the intent? I will leave you with those quesitons to ponder over after reading about this project by Santiago Sierra:

This project is titled "21 Anthropometric Modules Made From Human Faeces By The People Of Sulabh International, India". The sculptures are just that - wrought of human excrement. From Guardian, "They look like oversized garden-centre trays for growing tomatoes. One might think of them as wholesome examples of recycling in action, although why anyone would want to manufacture all these unwieldy blocks in the first place is more the issue. They all stand on their longer sides, in the opened wooden crates in which each was shipped. One side of each slab is flat, the other is a shallow lidless box, into which, as the title suggests, a human being might fit. As with much of Sierra's work, what counts is the story as much as the objects themselves, which are an unprepossessing sight. The rows of slabs standing in their crates, the lids against the walls, packing material and rubbish lying about on the unswept floor - it all gives the air of interrupted labour, of things in transit."

"The excrement was collected in New Delhi and Jaipur by the low-caste poor who, atoning for their deeds in previous lives, scavenge human faecal matter for a living. The ordure collectors in this case work for Sulabh International, a group dedicated to improving the appalling sanitary conditions in India and bettering the lives of those forced to earn a living by manually collecting and disposing of human waste."

"According to Pilar Villela Mascaró, writing in the catalogue, Sierra 'will be selling shit to art collectors and explicitly stating that its surplus value has been provided by labourers who sponsored the piece by working for free'. Mascaró makes this argument only to dispose of it, as it were, later. The point is that Sierra is doing as much as he can to dramatise both how the work came about and where it might end up. Works of 1960s minimalist art often looked as if they were made by machines, or were so pure and immaculate that they had surely been beamed down by superior beings from outer space. Sierra's blocks, on the other hand, are the result of deeply unpleasant, though unseen toil, and can be bought by anyone who hands over their filthy lucre."