Best project...ever? Michael and Lenka's Typewriter Drawings. Michael Crowe and Lenka Clayton: Typewriter Drawings Ohhhh this is so nice.
Last November, while you were perhaps been toiling away at a tax return or flicking numb-eyed through the Argos catalogue that you found on the bus, friends and occasional artistic collaborators Michael Crowe and Lenka Clayton were up to something very special indeed. Every day in November Michael and Lenka would create one drawing of something they had witnessed first hand that day, using only a typewriter as their medium. The results are a meltingly pleasant and touching collection of some of the sweetest, most honest images you’ll see in a long time. Taryn Simon. U.S.
Customs and Border Protection, Contraband Room John F. Kennedy International Airport Queens, New York African cane rats infested with maggots, African yams (dioscorea), Andean potatoes, Bangladeshi cucurbit plants, bush meat, cherimoya fruit, curry leaves (murraya), dried orange peels, fresh eggs, giant African snail, impala skull cap, jackfruit seeds, June plum, kola nuts, mango, okra, passion fruit, pig nose, pig mouths, pork, raw poultry (chicken), South American pig head, South American tree tomatoes, South Asian lime infected with citrus canker, sugar cane (poaceae), uncooked meats, unidentified sub tropical plant in soil. All items in the photograph were seized from the baggage of passengers arriving in the U.S. at JFK Terminal 4 from abroad over a 48-hour period.
All seized items are identified, dissected, and then either ground up or incinerated. Chromogenic print, 37-1/4 x 44-1/2 inches framed (94.6 x 113 cm), Edition of 7 © Taryn Simon. Nan goldin the ballad of sexual dependency. Nan Goldin: 'I wanted to get high from a really early age' The first thing you see as you enter Nan Goldin's living room is a coyote, its head thrown back and its teeth bared as if in mid-howl.
To Goldin's delight, it startles me. She hugs it as if to prove it is indeed a stuffed creature, then carries it over to a tall corner window – "It likes the light" – from where it can intrigue those passing beneath her third-floor window in Brooklyn. As metaphors go, the coyote is a good one for one of the most celebrated and controversial photographers of our time. Goldin is an outsider by instinct and nocturnal by nature, someone who lives on the edge of society by her own rules. Disobedient Objects review – raw protest in genteel surroundings. Design is more interesting when it is driven by intent and urgency, rather than the wish to tickle the appetites of shoppers of products.
Medical and military objects, or those formed in the face of material shortages, or in response to the release of a new technique, tend to have a surprising logic and a true inventiveness that comes from situations where preconceptions are wasteful luxuries. No one would have come up with something as luminously odd as an x-ray or a submarine unless they really had to. The same is true of the banners, balustrades and stranger devices used in protest, where there is an unequal balance of resources between protesters and whatever authorities they are opposing.
Disobedient Objects, V&A Museum, review: "utterly engrossing" Disobey! Debate surrounding political art in the last few years has yielded a number of imperatives – concerned with aspects ranging from solidarity, to sites of display, to relationships with the art industry – aimed, it would seem, at weeding out hipsterish political dilettantes looking for an easy veneer of real-world credibility.
Tania Bruguera has called for political art that ‘works on the consequences of its existence’ rather than simply regurgitating images and acts already in the public domain. Thomas Hirschhorn has written about working for a ‘non-exclusive public’ and the difference between ‘making political art’ (bad) and ‘making art politically’ (good).
Art historian and critic Barbara Rose has railed in The Brooklyn Rail against ‘superficial agitprop’ and made strong distinctions between ‘facile sloganeering’ and the work of artists profoundly invested in their political subject matter. Manage your pages. Tools of protest: Disobedient Objects, the V&A's subversive new show. The 'inflatable cobblestone', designed by the Eclectic Electric Collective to outwit authorities at street protests.
Photograph: V&A A battered pan lid sits next to a crudely printed teacup, alongside other odds and ends that look more like the sort of stuff you'd pick up in a jumble sale than exhibits you'd expect to see at a national museum. Yet these humble bits and bobs, on show at the V&A in London, have helped to win rights, change laws and even topple governments. The teacup, which is stamped with what looks at first glance like a shonky counterfeit Starbucks logo, actually bears the emblem of the Women's Social and Political Union – it was designed by Sylvia Pankhurst and deployed as a way of bringing the suffragette campaign into the genteel heart of Edwardian drawing rooms. Carrie Reichardt's Tiki Love Truck being driven through Manchester driven in protest against the death penalty. "The police just don't know what to do with things like this," says Grindon.