Artist/writer Bajema has been one of my biggest inspirations over the years. It’s through Beth’s work that I first “met” Coilhouse co-writer Zoe some five years ago by following a link from Bajema.com. Bajema’s wistful images make me feel as though the world is still full of secrets, and a lot of the images hint at the idea of a hidden mystical order. The sensual titles of her work enhance the sense of longing evoked by her images – Saturnine, The Angel Balm, Insects and Angels, & Snapdragon Tea are just a few examples. Her site is currently going through a majer overhaul so it’s down, but she’s recently uploaded much of her older work to her MySpace page. Even though the graphics are small, they are still lush and it’s great to see them all together. Can’t wait until you get your site up, Beth.
Well, hello! While we’re all waiting for the next installment of What’s Zo Wearing to appear here on Coilhouse, I thought I’d treat you to some fashion tips coming from a real pro: Brenda Dickson, whose claim to fame is starring in the soap opera “The Young and the Restless”. If you watch this video, then you too can be beautiful, glamorous and stylish like her. So let’s “teleport” into her closet and take a look!
Feeling fab yet? Here’s Part 2, dubbed over with fucking Dada raunch genius by Deven Green. “I just tattooed this cat this morning. Look at the good I do. Get the hell out of here. I’m a pirate.”
Hideaki Anno is still best known for Evangelion, but of no less significance is his gorgeous live action film “Ritual”. Unknown to me at the time of viewing, Ritual is based on a novel written by the female lead Ayako Fujitani – Japanese daugher of Steven Segal, and the Director is played by an actual indie director Shunji Iwai. The cinematography is absolutely jaw-dropping, and the plot is wonderful as well. While some of the film’s trailers seem to have marketed it as a horror film, this is not the case at all. Instead, Ritual explores human nuance.
After a chance meeting a jaded filmmaker finds inspiration as he documents a strange girl who dresses up in costumes, paints her face, calls every tomorrow her birthday and lives alone in a huge abandoned warehouse she’s made her world. He communicates with her through his video camera, drawn slowly into her psyche and her fantasy life. Without giving away too much, I propose you stay away from too much research and reviews, and see this film with fresh eyes, as I did.
Initially, exposure to composer/performer Judy Dunaway and her “virtuostic balloon-playing” broke my brain. But after the giggle fit subsided, I realized I was genuinely in awe of the woman, for many of the same reasons I’ve long adored Harry Partch, Hans Reichel, Clara Rockmore, and Klaus Nomi. Like them, Dunaway is utterly fearless in her approach to her craft, and unflinching in the face of inevitable backlash from both her classical and avante-garde contemporaries. (It takes ovaries of steel to play Lincoln Center with nothing but an amplified balloon between your knees, ah tell you whut.)
Her Etudes No.1 and 2 for Balloon and Violin (2004) are particular favorites of mine, perhaps because they’re what my own stuffy classical violin instructor would undoubtedly have dismissed as “good musicans behaving unforgivably.” I’m at a loss to accurately describe the music… imagine what an orgy of parasitic wasps being slowly pressed to death between two lubricated sheets of mylar might sound like. New York Press writer Kenneth Goldsmith likened Dunaway’s live performances to witnessing “Cab Calloway in Munchkinland… Olivier Messiaen on helium.”
Dunaway’s own statement of purpose is more straightforward:
My own work … does not come out of a void. Creating a large body of work for balloons has allowed me to develop a vocabulary outside the realm of oppressive classical heritage. It has raised the ordinary and mundane to the status of high art. I have fetishized this simple cheap toy in my music, as the violin has been fetishized for centuries by Western European-influenced composers. In an era where the progress toward a woman’s control of her own body is threatened, I have coupled myself to a musical instrument that expresses sensuality, sexuality and humanity without inhibition.
“The mask serves the double function of displaying and concealing; it is at once surface and depth.”- Francette Patceau, The Symptom of Beauty
This image and the ones after the cut come from the book “Torture Garden: From Bodyshocks to Cybersex,” edited by Dave TG. This book, a frozen moment of 90s fetish club culture, mixes party photos with formal studio shots to showcase the personalities and fetishes of TG’s clubgoes, along with inspirational and well-researched fetish-related quotations.
What strikes me about Alan Sivroni’s portraits in the book is that not one person in his images appears to be insecure or uncomfortable. There are images of old and young people of every ethnicity and body type, and the one thing they have in common is that they all project total ownership and control. That’s not what I see when I look at fetish portraits today. It makes me wonder: was the fetish scene really more confident then than it is now, or is it just careful editing?
It’s Mask Day at Coilhouse! A personal favorite topic, and research at the moment. As always, you’re welcome to submit your own additions to the theme.
And while we’re on the topic of self-transformation – a photo of a Navaho tribesman in a fur and leather mask, taken in 1904 by Edward S. Curtis. The Navaho typically made these masks specifically for dancing – inspiring, especially when one to feels too lazy to dress up, before a club for instance!
We previously blogged about Paddy Hartley’s Project Facade, cialis a uniform-sculpture exploration of wartime trauma and facial reconstruction. But before Hartley became known for Project Facade, ambulance he received international acclaim for another project – a series of face corsets focused on exploring attitudes towards plastic surgery and ideals of facial beauty.
The bioglass and cinching invoke Botox, collagen, implants and other techniques that stretch and compress our faces into their ideal shape – but only temporarily. Hartley elaborates on these ideas and more in an excellent interview over at We Make Money not Art.
Any man who puts pictures like this of himself on the internet in order to make an artistic point has our respect forever.
From artist Jill Magid’s site: The Kissmask is designed to be worn by two women. The connecting tube isolates the womens’ mouth and nose creating a heated space between them. A microphone sewn into the connecting tube records the conversation, breathing, and kissing that occurs inside. A CD of these recordings is exhibited with the mask.
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Is the idea of this object to satisfy heterosexual curiosity about the lesbian experience by essentially bottling its essence, or is it there to protect the moment while preserving its memory, perhaps without getting too close? I love the photos themselves – fragile and wistful. And the obstruction is, well, hot.
