shepard fairey’s obama: whose is it?

Stephen Colbert peels through the layers of the debate surrounding copyright of Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama poster in this brilliant piece of reportage (The former director of the Whitney Museum, David Ross, and brother Ed Colbert, a copyright laywer, play supporting roles):

… and since I’ve been fighting with the css code freely supplied by colbertnation.com for longer than it’s worth, and have yet to win, this image is just a tease. Check out the whole 6:37 min video here: Shepard Fairey’s Obama: Whose Is It?

the sticky business of polling

 

Guerilla poster art + the chaos of the crowd + worldwide dissemination via the Internet = Gum Election 2008.

Since mid-October, when this ingenious project went live on WordPress, these posters have shown up as far abroad as Sydney, Sao Paulo, and Duesseldorf, Germany, gummed up by passersby. Check out Gum Election’s blog for live results—and the occasional subversive message. 

Now that’s my kind of poll.

halloween retrospective

I love Halloween, gratuitously and unconditionally. And Halloween in New York City is spectacular.

courtesy geekologie.com

Between the hours of 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. it’s as if the children from Where The Wild Things Are (with a couple trick-or-treaters from The Nightmare Before Christmas thrown in for good measure) take over the city, then after sundown the big kids shut down Sixth Avenue for the Halloween Parade, arguably the best in the country, and then, and then … and then somehow the sun’s up. It’s the closest the real world gets to Burning Man.

So paging through my Google Reader today I was thrilled to come across these costumes. First, geekologie’s post, “Eff It, I’m Going As an IPhone” (click the link for a dozen other photos), and secondly, L.A. artist Jubilee A. Horn’s interpretation of Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama poster, courtesy Eyeteeth blog. Until next year … 

courtesy eyeteeth.blogspot.com

behind the looking glass (part 2)

And then there are the people. Half of what’s so fascinating about looking at animals is observing people watching animals.

i see you (green frog at Bronx zoo)

The things they say: “Eww look at that one, he’s sniffing the other’s poo!” (a child at the warthog exhibit at the Bronx Zoo). “Is that real?” (an elderly woman approaches the rabbit display at the Village Petstore with some trepidation.) “It is!” (she concludes).

The things they do: The whistles, the clucking noises, the ridiculous postures, energy expended, all to momentarily capture the passive gaze of some animal. (An exception was a gorilla at the Bronx Zoo who sat next to the glass, bemusedly inspecting us, sticking her tongue or putting her hand flush up against the glass over where a child’s hand pressed against the glass from the other side). And then there’s the faux hunting, donning camouflage or safari gear (an excess of pockets, tan and olive tones) and crouching low behind bushes so as to not disturb the wildlife, but get the best shot (as in photograph) of “nature in action.”

behind the looking glass

  those stripes actually work
What does the Bronx Zoo, the Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill, a Banksy installation in Greenwich Village, and an actual pet shop with sweet pups in the window have in common? 

Well, yes, they all have animals—albeit exotic, domestic, and “other.” But that’s not the thought that kept knocking around in my head, while tracking down the giraffes, the gorillas and the big bears at the zoo, or while marveling at the ingeniousness of the Banksy installation, or while cooing over puppies tumbling around in shredded paper strips. The shocking realization was how we observers (myself not excluded) expect, demand even, some sort of performance from the animals. To happen upon a zebra grazing in a non-African-looking environment is startling.

she files her nails at the village petstore

Where’s the set? What about the children, I mused, is seeing the zebra here, like this, going to mislead them to thinking that zebras roam free in the wilds of upstate New York, when they see a like habitat? Elsewhere, crowds clustered around a gorilla sitting against the glass. She sat there, bemusedly inspecting us (with a little too much self awareness, I thought), sticking her tongue out, occasionally putting her hand flush up against the glass over where a child’s hand pressed against the glass from the other side.

At the Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill, the “pets,” per se, are putting on a show—they’re acting human. A chimp watches animal shows on television, surrounded with the litter of human

existential monster crisis!

monster an' me

Look at this face. Is it not cheek-pinchably cute? Don’t you just want to feed him some sushi? He’s one of three awesome monsters skulking around DUMBO these days as a part of Kylin O’Brien’s Monster Project, where monsters drawn by school kids (Maya, age 5, imagined this one) are blown up many, many times and pasted up on buildings around the city — at least, that’s the goal. So far there are just these three. 

Monsters were a reoccurring theme this year at the annual Art Under the Bridge Festival in DUMBO. Elsewhere I recall monster finger puppets shaking their skinny, gelatin-y limbs at me from collage-on-wood-panel works at one of the open studios at 20 Jay Street (“rawrr come in and drink some wine,” was how I interpreted it). There were others. 

… which, without going too off topic, brings me to the existential monster crisis. It’s a serious issue these days

Judith Supine

okay it’s not that I haven’t been busy. Here’s a link to my profile of Judith Supine, the NYC-based street artist whose universe I want to live in: Judith Supine, Brooklyn Rail (December 2007/January 2008).
By the by, this image is courtesy of Supine’s flickr site.