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(Source: gho-ul, via omyearsandwhiskers)
Each of these awesome sculptures is made of marble. Look closely and you still might not believe it. Your eyes tell you that Mona Lisa and skull are clearly made of styrofoam, but they were both carefully carved from solid marble by Italian artist Fabio Viale.
“Viale does some incredible work to modernize this “old-fashioned” medium, like re-creating Greek Korus torsos and hands covered in tattoos. He is able to transform this heavy, bulky material into creations that seem light and airy, like old beat up tires popcorn or crumpled paper bags.”
He even created a roll of marble toilet paper! It’s beautiful, playful, and incredibly detailed work.
Visit Beautiful Decay to view a couple more examples of Fabio Viale’s astonishing artwork.
Cheryl Donegan, Head, 1993.
One of the best video installations from the New Museum’s “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” exhibit was Head by Cheryl Donegan.
It’s a single shot. I’d desribe it as a blow job to a punctured plastic carton of gushing milk, with sucking, slurping, spitting…. the works. Maybe it’s not. Then, what is this? I guess it’s what you want it to be.
The artists asks in her last sentence of an interview with the Los Angeles Times :
“What makes a scenario pornographic?”
- Your “head”. AHHHHH!
Jessica Diamond
b. 1957 New York, NY
Tributes to Kusama: Infinity, 1992/1993
Flashe and latex paint on wall
Collection Luigi Polla
Jessica Diamond’s early paintings laergely consisted of conceptual, satirical slogans that critiqued the competitive and commerce-driven aspects of the art world. In 1992, she began producing “Tributes to Kusama,” a series that marked a considerable break in tone from previous work and celebrates the career and life of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Known for her large-scale installations and quirky brand of abstraction- notably her repetition of tiny marks and patterns- Kusama represents the psychedelic, idealistic attitudes prevalent in the ’60s. Though some formal elements from Kusama’s work appear renewed in Diamond’s paintings (such as the bright color palette). Diamond does not seek to imitate or regurgigate Kusama’s style. Rather, Diamond pays homage to the Japanese artist throgh the lens of her own work. She retains handwritten text (from her earlier years) as a central component and continues to apply paint directly onto gallery walls, rescaling the artworks according to the needs of each particular space. For Infinity, Diamond expands on the idea of the infinite as seen in Kusama’s work, such as in her “Infinity Net” paintings. The letters that make up the word “Infinity” seem to break through the warm golden hue behind, which suggests an intrinsically hopeful glow.
Text taken from:
New Museum, NY. “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star”
Chocolate busts!
I chuckled when one of the museum gards (I usually feel they are the eye lash that get’s stuck in my eye when trying to look at something nice.) scolded a girl to step away from one of the busts. I thought he might be afraid of her licking the bust. He told me they had several people actually biting the busts and they had to be replaced. He phrased it “There’s not a lot of time between smelling and biting”. I later found out he had taken this phrasing from the artist herself also stating in an interview with artnews.com :
“It’s a funny thing when you make pieces about desire and people succumb to their desire.”
To make Lick and Lather, Janine Antoni began with the traditional genre of portrait bust. She created a mold directly from her upper body, addded a Neo-Classical base, and cast the whole form in chocolate and soap. Producing fourteen copies in all, Antoni then “re-sculptured” each bust individually either through licking (in the case of the chocolate) or washing (in the case of the soap). The results indes Antoni’s body through both her physical impression and through her actions, while her process transforms the bust from a heroic public depiction into an intimate and fragile relic.
Antoni conceiced this piece specifucally for the Aperto section at the ‘93 Venice Biennale. The convention of the sculptural bust and Neo-Classical base reference classical sculpture throughout the city of Venice, but Antoni’s piece also calls attention to the transformation of material over time. She noted, “Venice is totally eroding. I cam upon these stone sculptures, and they looked very much like my soap head because the feautures had been washed away.”
I decided to visit the New Museum during my 8h layover in New York. To my surprise, the New Museum happens to be the only museum in New York City which is devoted exclusively to contemporary art. The exhibition that is on display “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” shows art made and exhibited in New York over the course of that particular year. Why exactly 1993 remains a secret. Also, I have no real memory of 1993 other than probably being overly excited to see the upcoming Lion King like any 6-year-old at that time. For that matter, I missed at least some hints on historical context and a wee bit of explanation, I expected maybe a timeline or a video installation with soundbits and news coverage from the time. However, the New Museum doesn’t strike me as a place that offers much explanation for anything anyhow. It is a 7 floor building with each floor working as a time capsule, an experiment in collective memory that attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics.
Taking the elevator to the highest floor you enter one single room that takes up the entire floor space of the building; Its floor covered with orange carpet which is supposed to preserve the foot prints of each and every visitor and Gonzalez Torres’s light sculpture made of a string of light bulbs dangling from the ceiling. A mural with arching birds, also Gonzalez Torres I believe, gave you the impression to stand on a platform, possibly on a roof top with a fogged view. Clearly the ceiling ruins this effect. And then, this interplay with the haunting music of Christin Oppenheim’s Sail on Sailor (click on the link above to listen, please do). I happend to be in this huge room all by myself and felt this immersive feeling of eeriness. 
In contrast to the emptiness of room number one, the exhibition on the lower floors starts to get packed with art objects and video installations, quite overwhelming so.
Oh, look, Nan Goldin because, remember AIDS?
Look, Wolfgang Staehle’s The Thing, because holy shit there’s internet now and stuff. Larry Clark because he’s sexy. Wolfgang Tillmans because he’s sexy. Matthew Barney because he’s Matthew Barney aaand he’s sexy. The museum shows his crazy whack costumes in DRAWING RESTRAINT 7 the forerunner to his epic The CREMASTER Cycle. As a late 90s teenager they remind me a lot of Buffy the Vampire slayer and Charmed. Please excuse my layman comparisons.
I will try to highlight some of my personal favorites of “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” in the following days.
(via gifmovie)
Mamihlapinatapai
A look shared by two people, each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”
(Source: pushthemovement)
