The Pastiche of moments.

Vincent Van Gogh, A pair of shoes, 1886. "I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure colour in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense—sight, the visual, the eye—which it now reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous space in its own right—part of some new division of labour in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them." (Jameson, p.58)

Andy Warhol, diamond Dust Shoes, 1980. Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and coloured surface of things—debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images—has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhol’s pieces—most notably, the traffic accidents or the electric chair series—this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in the disposition of the subject. (Jameson,p.64)

The waning of affect, however, might also have been characterized, in the narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of the great high-modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysyeries of duree and of memory (something to be understood fully as a category of literary criticism associated as much with high modernism as with the works themselves). We have often been told, however, that we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism proper. (Jameson, p.64) Jameson,Frederick, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press Books, 1990.

The Global Fishing Crisis

How the United Socialist Party of Venezuela is improving the lives of the materially poor.

MacMaster + Leahy play the fiddle | Video on TED.com

MacMaster + Leahy play the fiddle | Video on TED.com

Photomontage and Hannah Hoch.

I made a Chanel themed collage last week. I was inspired by the music of Girltalk (Gregg Michael Gillis). He is a musician who makes music from mash-ups/remixes of popular songs. You can see some really good fan videos set to his songs on Youtube. The animated video by students at Concordia University is outstanding. I really like the whole concept of creating art from popular culture like Warhol and Dada. I wanted to make something that reflected my interest in contemporary media, fashion and advertising.


Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919, collage of pasted papers, 90 x 144 cm, Staatliche Museum, Berlin.

Hannah Hoch (November 1, 1889 – May 31, 1978) was a German Dada artist. The Dadaists referred to their works as photomontage rather than collage in order to reinforce the mechanical, industrial worker associations with that word. This term also served to distinguish their work from Cubist collages.

Hoch began making photomontages in 1918 - after the end of World War 1 and the beginning of the Weimar Republic (1919). She arranged images from printed media to comment on social and political issues of this time. She was dissatisfied with the actions of the new, democratic government which still seemed to be strongly influenced by the Imperial, Militaristic forces it claimed to oppose.

Her work also evolved to contain the main theme of gender relations, in particular women's role in the new Germany. Rather than serious moralizing, Hoch presented her ideas with irony and humour.

Technically her talent for layering and patterning images in a complex style reflected her skills as a patternmaker/designer in her job at Ullstein Press. She designed and illustrated textile patterns for women's magazines.

Her work was never taken seriously by the Dadaist artists at the time, most of whom were male. Women's work wasn't valued as highly as men's in those times and indeed women had only been granted the vote in 1919. But this was also a time of universal suffrage. Hoch used her work to express her own personal dissatisfactions while at the same time observing broader social themes of marriage and bourgeois life. Taken as a whole her body of work represents an important comment and observation of women's political role in Germany.

Smiley face - trailer Video by SMILEY FACE - MySpace Video

Smiley face - trailer Video by SMILEY FACE - MySpace Video

This is the funniest movie I've seen in a long time. Anna Faris is great as the leading character. Her strength comes from the fact that she isn't playing a role in a romantic comedy. She behaves very gender neutral and seems to be very independent. Director Gregg Araki's first film The Living End was banned in the United States because it had a gay sex scene. All of his movies contain edgy counterculture themes and characters. This movie transported me back to my twenties with its comedic portrayal of the confusion and uncertainty of youth.

Are Women as Horny as Men? from Last Pictures - Video

Are Women as Horny as Men? from Last Pictures - Video

This clip is great because it plays with gender roles. The reversal technique is also used in the Madwomen clip featured on my website. Its clever because it confronts stereotypes and expectations.