According to the Daily Mail, Bump Art is all the rage. This involves pregnant women painting their baby bumps. The Guardian interviews professional bump artist Julia Francis who says that "around 70% of women choose nature-based ideas such as flowers and leaves, a small percentage go for something 'really bizarre', and she has even done a few planets."
Well, it sure beats placenta art. I guess us men can always join in the fun by painting our food-baby bumps.
The woman depicted above went from female dentist to occult artist. Not the most common career path. She turned out many paintings "inspired" by ghosts.
Unfortunately, despite a fairly substantial career, none of her paintings seem to have survived or been recorded, except for the one depicted below.
Weird Shoes are not just for women! The makers of the apex predator shoes
shown above say they contain 1050 teeth from dentures! At the link you will see on left side that they also make the apex predator suit.
Random International invites you to experience what it’s like to control the rain. Visitors can choose to simply watch the spectacle or find their way carefully through the rain, putting their trust in the work to the test.
More than the technical virtuosity necessary for its success, the piece relies on a sculptural rigour, with the entire Curve transformed by the monumental proportions of this carefully choreographed downpour and the sound of water.
Posted By: Alex - Thu Oct 11, 2012 -
Comments (5)
Category: Art
We've discussed artist Jonathon Keats before here on WU. Back in June 2009, Chuck referred to him as an artist "whose mind is either way ahead of ours, or way behind ours, but definitely not even-up with ours." That was when Keats had recently published a short story, nine words long, written in a special kind of ink that would only become visible very slowly, at the rate of a century per word.
But Keats has been active since then. He's got a new installation titled "Cloning Celebrity" at San Francisco's Modernism Gallery. Here's a description:
In five pilot studies at the AC Institute, Keats is epigenetically cloning five celebrities. His subjects are some of the most popular people alive, and some of the most widely emulated, including Lady Gaga, Michael Phelps and Barack Obama. He has metabolically analyzed each by assessing their gross biochemical intake, and is methodically exposing large populations of living cells to similar chemical formulae, systematically activating epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation. While the cells are not human, they are known to be genetically similar to Homo sapiens, and have been used as model organisms in the world's leading laboratories. Keats is epigenetically cloning Obama, Phelps and Gaga in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as brewer's yeast.
Dan Schifrin, writing in jweekly.com, describes some of Keats's other projects:
Keats made his debut in 2000 at Refusalon in San Francisco, where he sat in a chair and thought for 24 hours, with a female model posing nude in the gallery. His thoughts were sold to patrons as art, at a price determined by dividing their annual income down to the minute...
In 2004, in collaboration with U.C. Berkeley geneticists, Keats attempted to genetically engineer God in a laboratory. Keats determined that God bore a striking genetic similarity to algae, but — employing proper scientific language — he acknowledged that the study was "not definitive."...
He also was commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum to make a modern version of manna, which he interpreted as a pillbox full of placebos — manna being whatever medicine was needed at that moment.
Posted By: Alex - Sun Sep 23, 2012 -
Comments (7)
Category: Art
Martin Creed has a reputation as one of the most controversial artists in the UK. People seem to either love him or hate him. He won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2001, so evidently some critics love him. But what's your opinion? I've listed some of his works below.
Work No. 227: Lights Going On and Off. He programmed the lights in an art gallery to turn on and off every five seconds.
Work No. 850: Duveen Commission. He hired athletes to sprint through the Tate Gallery every 30 seconds, all day, every day for four and a half months.
Work No. 628: Half the Air in a Given Space. He filled an art gallery with blue balloons.
Work No. 610: Sick Film. He made a video showing a series of people who walk into a white studio and vomit. (The first section of the film, below, is on youtube.)
Zarh H. Pritchard (1866-1956) is a little-remembered artistic pioneer of the 20th century. (There's not even a wikipedia page about him!) His claim to fame is that he was the first artist to paint underwater.
Pritchard would descend to the ocean floor in a diving suit and then paint using waterproof paints on a lambskin canvas soaked in oil. An article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (June 18, 1922) provides more details about the process:
It was in Tahiti [1904] that he first decided to make a try at painting pictures in the realm of Neptune and the lair of the mermaids. For the experiment he prepared a waterproof canvas and had his colors ground extra thick.
His first descent was for a distance of about 65 feet. At the end of about a half an hour cold and fatigue forced him to return to the surface. Later, as he became more adapted to his new environment, he was able to stay longer. He now works at depths varying from 16 to 50 feet. He can work at any depth to which a diver can descend.
When he starts to work he is clad in the customary diving costume with leaded shoes, air hose and signal ropes. He descends slowly through the water and after reconnoitering the territory in which he is going to paint selects a comfortable rock. He then pulls the signal rope and his easel and box of colors are lowered to him. He blocks in his outlines, lays his tints and finishes the picture roughly.
Some of Pritchard's underwater works are below. They sold quite well. The Prince of Monaco, who was a respected oceanographer in addition to being royalty, was a big fan and bought many of them. Read more about Pritchard here.
Around twenty-five years previously: a person wears a white helmet that is submarine-like in the way it extends to the front and back. His entire head disappears into the futurist capsule; only the title betrays what is happening inside it. The TV Helmet of 1967 is a technical device that isolates the user while imbedding him or her in an endless web of information: closed off against the outside world, the wearer is completely focused on the screen before his or her eyes. This work by Walter Pichler doesn't merely formally anticipate the cyber glasses developed decades later. He also articulated questions of content in relation to the media experience long before the "virtual world" was even discovered. Pichler called his invention a Portable Living Room, and this is usually interpreted as scathing sarcasm. When at least the tube is on in the living room, then we can easily do without varnished cabinets and potted violets, the title seems to say.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.