Friday, December 14, 2012

Inspired by...

Currently inspired by...

Kjell Varvin’s most recent installations. I’ve been following his work for a long time, and have written about it on the The Storialist (here, back in March of 2010--weird that it was over two years ago!). Here's an interesting interview with him, too.

"The Joy of Burning Down the House," by Ben Schrank (on FSG’s Work in Progress). I love the questions that Schrank asks of writers here: “Why does no one writer want to admit that the process of writing, while often terribly trying, can also be bliss? Are writers trying to keep this secret to themselves?” I completely agree with him--it’s a painful pleasure/pleasurable pain. And it is FUN. We (writers/artists) need to accept accountability for our work and decisions...


Kishi Bashi. Read more on him and his music in my Musical Interlude at Spoonful.


This video on Michael Wolff on living with curiosity and attentiveness. Love this.



The semester is finished, and I’m almost done with grades. I am so looking forward to doing some good "research" (reading, writing, exploring of ideas, finally catching up on blogs) over break! What's inspiring you these days?


2 comments

  1. Love Varvin's work, its conceptual challenge, the wonderful arrangements.

    Have a wonderful weekend, Hannah.

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  2. Sometimes I’ve believed as much as six impossible things before breakfast…and all of them are Alice.

    What’s inspiring me (yester)day was your site actually, more specifically your daily art viewing, a gallery of which I shared with my daughter here on her semester break. I was trying to show her a different “niche” of contemporary art than the deviant art style she inhabits to its borders. She was distinctly unimpressed, favoring “storytelling” over l’art pour l’art (“but those are stories,” I protested). Still it stoked the need to connect, which we satisfied in the ghosts of Da Vinci, Hopper, Mapplethorpe, Vargas etc. glazed in the display case of the deviant (Giger) counter.

    We also had a little dust-up about music videos, the old technique vs. substance, professional vs. amateur debate, to which I find the I Am the Antichrist to You video a nice demilitarized zone (and the song itself like yet another lovely lost outtake from Zabriskie Point). I also appreciate in that context Michael Wolff’s comment that it was “not the technical aspects of photography” that he is interested in.

    What an amazingly obsessed artist he is! He’s not concerned about recognition at all, just the thing, and he takes the long-focus view on even that, conducting his blog as an experiment in the timelessness of fashion. Wow! It certainly explains why he gets such fetching and moving portraits of women to see the incredibly gorgeous face behind the camera. There is no observer, only the observed.

    Bill

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