Well shit, I don’t normally use emojis in my daily life, but I just might start because these fantastic Cindy Sherman-icons by New York-based artist Hyo Hong. “I found iconic connections between her self-portraits and emoticons in terms of various facial expressions from one face,” said Hong.

I have to agree, there’s a Cindy Sherman emoticon for every type of feels!

You can download the Cindy Sherman-icons for your phone on Hyo Hong’s Tumblr page.

 

 

 

 
via It’s That Nice

 
Nan Goldin became obsessed with taking photographs of her friends and classmates at school—she says she became the class photographer. One of her first subjects was her best friend David Armstrong who was into drag. After they graduated from school, Goldin and Armstrong shared an apartment and he introduced her to the world of drag queens. Goldin spent time photographing David and his friends.

After years of experiencing and photographing the struggle of the two genders with their codes and definitions, and their difficulties in relating to each other, it was liberating to meet people who had crossed these gender boundaries.

Most people get scared when they can’t categorize others—by race, by age, and most of all by gender. It takes nerve to walk down the street when you fall between the cracks. Some of my friends shift genders daily from boy to girl and back again.

 

Misty and Jimmy.
 
Goldin was born in 1953 the youngest of four children to a middle class Jewish family in Washington D.C. Not long after she was born, the family moved to the suburbs of Lexington, Boston. She was a rebellious child and ran away from home, and was eventually fostered by several families during her teens. Goldin has said she was “full of raw energy, creativity and sensuality” and found the fifties and early sixties an oppressive, difficult time. Then she discovered photography. First she took Polaroids, then shot Super 8, before taking regular photographs that she had developed at the local drugstore. Her friends would stack the pictures in piles to see who had the most portraits. Though these pictures were her a kind of diary—documenting her life, her relationships, her sexuality and her friends who became family (“We were the world to each other”)—the photographs were created out of her relationships and not observation.
 

Actress, writer and friend Cookie Mueller.
 

The work has always been misunderstood as being about a certain milieu of drugs and parties and the underground. And although I’d say that my family is still marginal and we don’t want to be part of normal society, I don’t think the work has been about that, I think the work has been about the condition of being human—the pain, the ability to survive and how difficult that is.

In this beautiful short film, Nan Goldin discusses her life and career, friends, drug addiction and the “other world” she has documented.
 

 
A selection of Nan Goldin’s beautiful photographs, after the jump…

 
This is totally amazing. Ronit Baranga is a ceramic sculptor from Israel, and she has come up with a set of tableware that will automatically call up images of Fester, Lurch, Wednesday, the Thing, and the rest of the Addams clan. Her website is a total trip, and I look forward to seeing more of her creations in the future.

Baranga’s high-minded comment on her anthropomorphic set runs like this:
 

The useful, passive, tableware can now be perceived as an active object, aware of itself and its surroundings – responding to it. It does not allow to be taken for granted, to be used. It decides on its own how to behave in the situation.

 
When regular household items become “active objects,” that’s usually what we call haunting, or possibly something like a Nest Learning Thermostat—either way, I won’t get too worried until one of these pieces actually starts nibbling at my lips or walking towards me!
 

 

 

 
If you haven’t already lost your appetite, there’s more after the jump…

 
Midwesterners are quick to claim DEVO as native sons (as well we should—shout out to Akron, Ohio!), but this lovely little animation—a collab between Google Play and The California Sunday Magazine—illustrates their Hollywood migration in Mark Mothersbaugh’s own voice. But not before the prolific composer/artist/frontman/fashion designer (etc, etc, etc.) explains how he saw the world—fuzzy—until someone had the bright idea to test his vision when he was in the second grade.

I will say I feel like a complete dick after watching it. I had always subconsciously assumed Mark Mothersbaugh’s glasses were a bit of a nerd affectation/fashion choice (nothing wrong with fashion, and to be fair, they were certainly fashion for a couple of of DEVO fans I’ve met). Don’t get me wrong, I figured he needed specs, but I suspected the heavy frames of said specs were chosen more for their ostentatiously geeky aesthetic than mere functionality. Turns out there’s a lot of glass in those glasses, because he is legally blind and needs them to see damn near anything.

It also turns out that I am a cynical jerk. Sorry Mark!

Unsurprisingly, Mothersbaugh’s got his own line of eyewear. Is there anything this guy doesn’t dabble in???
 

 
Shade Rupe’s post mortem on the “David Bowie Is” exhibit in Chicago:

A cause célèbre for art, film and design institutions everywhere, with breaking attendance records, the Victoria & Albert—curated “Davie Bowie Is” exhibition is a marvel of closeness that zillions of fans through the decades never believed they’d be able to experience. In 1983 when D.A. Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was finally released we could squint through the reddish grain while our alien lord pranced and rocked the stage through multiple costume changes, mime, sucking off Mick Ronson’s… guitar, and admonishing his wife Angie’s makeup suggestions with “What do you know about makeup? You’re just a girl.” But this is different.

Debuting in Paris this month at the Philharmonie de Paris/ Cité de la Musique before then continuing to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands later in the year, the collection of costumes, outfits, memorabilia, and detritus, is vast as this is only a sampling of what the curators chose after Bowie opened his closets. Bowie’s self-application of color and cream is apparent with even a tissue that once blotted his lipstick is carefully displayed.
 

 
For Brits the ‘big moment’ was the “Starman” reveal on Top of the Pops, a moment given further clarity with a crew member shot backup film. While many English teenagers first got gobsmacked by that moment, even younger Americans were similarly blown away after over a decade of Bowie’s starring bursts when he premiered his devastatingly electric art moments during his December 15, 1979, Saturday Night Live performances with Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi on backup for scorching renditions of “The Man Who Sold the World” (in a Hugo Ball—inspired hourglass-shaped tuxedo), “TVC15” (in a school marm’s green dress with Arias and Nomi fending off a pink poodle with a TV in its mouth), and “Boys Keep Swinging,” with a Silly Putty—bodied Bowie unfurling a plastic penis, twice (though only shown on the first broadcast). Both programs make up significant parts of the exhibit.

Scary Monsters unleashed the final throes of Bowie’s magnificent more-than-a-decade of blowing Earth’s minds before settling down with that album that can’t be named (and thankfully is left out of the exhibition entirely). The next decade is skipped until we encounter Floria Sigismondi’s music videos (she’s created four for the Master in total) for “Little Wonder” and “Dead Man Walking.”

Other highlights of the exhibit, beyond getting to get ::this close:: to the Starman’s magic clothing include a gift of a test pressing of the first Velvet Underground album, bequeathed to Bowie’s manager Kenneth Pitt by Andy Warhol then to Bowie who exclaimed “By the time ‘European Son’ was done I was so excited I couldn’t move,” the keys to the underground bunker Bowie shared with Iggy Pop in Berlin which resulted in this writer’s own desert island disc The Idiot, and the Thin White Duke’s trusty cocaine spoon giving the man who fell to earth’s Diamond Dogs tour that extra bit of futuristic oomph.
 

 

 
This whimsical series by artist Michele Pred bears the title “Promote the General Welfare,” which phrase might ring a bell insofar as it is in the first line of the U.S. Constitution.

Some of the items feature actual neon, whereas others use electroluminescent wire twisted and bent to get a similar, albeit lo-fi, effect.

Pred’s comment on the series is as follows:
 

Each unique piece is made using a vintage handbag from the 1950s or ‘60s. For me, the use of purses from the mid-twentieth century harks back to that critical era, and reminds us how much has changed and, more importantly, how much has not. The text on each purse is created using Electroluminescent wire that is lit up using batteries and a small electronic driver that can be set to constant or flash mode.  The purses are meant to be carried and serve as small-scale political billboards.

 
Michele Pred’s work can be found at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery.
 

 

 

This translucent piece includes more than 20,000 expired birth control pills to “express the challenges many women have accessing affordable birth control”
 

 
More after the jump…

Boy on East 5th Street (4th of July), 1984
 
Anyone who’s hung out on Rivington Street the last few years might be surprised to learn that the East Village was one of the scariest parts of New York just a few decades ago. Not for nothing did one police officer in the 1980s label Avenue D “the world’s largest retail drug market.”

Photographer Ken Schles, who lived in the East Village in the 1980s, once said that it was “like a war zone.” Schles witnessed firsthand the heroin epidemic and the AIDS crisis happening all around him. His photographs, many taken from his bedroom window, depict the urgency and hopelessness of a neighborhood in crisis. 

Schles’ building, where he also had his darkroom, was in disrepair from the moment he moved in in 1978; just a few years later, the landlord abandoned the building, leaving tenants to their own devices. Schles led a rent strike and worked to improve the living conditions, as drug gangs moved in on the space.

Unlike the romanticized imagery produced by some, Schles’ frank pictures offer no illusion as to what is being depicted. Schles himslf is disgusted by such idealized portraits and offers a refreshingly honest and pragmatic take on the era—as he says, “I don’t pine for the days when I’d drive down the Bowery and have to lock the doors, or having to step over the junkies or finding the door bashed in because heroin dealers decided they wanted to set up a shooting gallery. ... A lot of dysfunction has been romanticized.”

Schles’ shots, many taken from his bedroom window, provide blurred and grainy fragments, stories to which we do not know the beginning, even if we can guess at the grim ending. Eventually Schles’ fellow artists and gallery owners banded together to rebuild the neighborhood.

In 1988 Schles published Invisible City, which has recently been reissued, and late last year he came out with a follow-up, Night Walk. Together they add up to an intimate study of a neighborhood that is no longer recognizable.

Invisible City and Night Walk are on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery on 57th Street until March 14, 2015.
 

Couple Fucking, 1985
 

Embrace, 1984
 

Landscape with Garbage Bag, 1984
 

Drowned in Sorrow, 1984
 

Scene at a Stag Party, May 1985
 

Claudia Lights Cigarette, 1985
 
More after the jump…..
 

 
If you were on the Internet at all last week, you probably saw that innocent picture of a dress taken at a wedding on the Scottish island of Colonsay, which had the improbable effect of sowing the seeds of disagreement, tearing families apart and pitting brother against brother like nothing since the Civil War. (Blue and grey are sorted out, so Ken Burns has a documentary about the dress in the works.)

Yes, is it blue and black or is it white and gold? Your answer to that question put you on one side or the other, and there was little way to bridge that gap. All over Facebook there were countless otherwise inscrutable postings along the lines of “It’s totally white and gold!” The one online poll I saw on the subject showed a 3 to 1 margin in favor of the incorrect position, white and gold. (Yes, the real dress is blue and black.)

Myself, the first time I saw it I was certain it was blue and black. The next day I took a look at it and I was equally certain it was white and gold. So that should tell you everything you need to know about certainty.

The Internet being what it is, it didn’t take long for some creative folks to be all, “OK, we disagree on the color of the dress, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create a fandom for it!” Here are some manga-style illos riffing on the blue/black and/or white/gold dress.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via RocketNews 24

 
This is L.O.V.E., a nearly 9-inch tall statuette of a hand without fingers, except the middle one which is pointing straight up (and we all know what that means).

Sure, it is a magnificent kitschy souvenir on its own, but this pedestaled obscene gesture also rotates and plays a “sweet classic and reassuring tune,” making it the most vulgar music box around.

L.O.V.E. is a miniaturized reproduction of a 36-foot white marble sculpture of the same name by Italian contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan. The artist donated this artwork to the city of Milan on the condition that it be placed in front of its stock exchange, Borsa Italiana, which it has (been flipping the bird) since 2011.
 

 

 

 
You’ll need to sleep with one eye open after looking at Wounderland, the “post-mortem fairy tales” portrait series of ghastly creatures by the Belgian duo Mothmeister.

Nearly all the hideous characters in the dark series are holding stiff, mounted animals, as the couple behind these unsettling photos are both taxidermists. “We reincarnate these dead critters into fairy tale figures by dressing them up like the Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter did.”

They state the “anonymous, ugly masked creatures” highlighted in their work are “a reaction against the dominant exhibitionism of the selfie culture and beauty standards marketed by the mass media.”

Put down that selfie stick and take a look at Wounderland for yourself.

 

 

 

 
More after the jump…