mlord's blog

NEWSWORKS has a story about The Quiet Volume:

This is a half-price (but still expensive) guided tour, but I'm pretty sure you can see all they're showing for free...just without the ride to everywhere.

Info on the open studios is at philaopenstudios.org/

Sixty Food Trucks will be in Chinatown for an event called NIGHT MARKET...and this is apparently the last one of the season.

"More than 60 of the city's best food trucks and ethnic and regional restaurants, serving up Japanese, French, Mexican, Italian, Venezuelan, Chinese, Southern, Hawaiian, Caribbean, Thai, Taiwanese, Indian, and Korean street foods ...and more.

Plus: More than a dozen local bands, artists, DJs and dragons."

Sounds like fun to me.

Consider

1) An artist (Dove Bradshaw) claims a fire hose in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a work of art.

2) She posts a label next tot he hose, and replaces it whenever it is removed.

3) She photographs her work and has postcards printed. She (secretly) deposits these postcards in the museums own gift shop. And they sell them. For years.

4) The museum acquires a photograph of the firehose and accepts it (the photograph) into its collection.

5) The firehose itself is later acquired by the museum that owns it; the artists work is donated to the museum, which is acknowledges in letters to the donor.

6) An artist book is created in an edition of 10 to document the trajectory of this project, which is now called a performance.

7) The book is published free online and you can peruse its 86 pages.

Flanagan mentions The Yes Men. Here's video of the outcome of one of their stunts.

or here: http://rt.com/usa/yes-men-bank-people-510/

During the Reagan administration, which none of the students in this class will remember, women who felt as if their rights were being cut back started a group called LADIES AGAINST WOMEN. They would go to places where the first lady was appearing and they would "protest" against the rights of women, making the positions of those who actually opposed womens' rights look...silly. Here is footage of some of these women at a parade, not in the context in which they usually performed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxlYKR0zZVM

Flanagan does not mention the Barbie Liberation Organization, but she might have. A number of activist/artists, working in secret, attained possession of Barbie Dolls and G.I. Joe Dolls (American soldier dolls for boys) and switched their voiceboxes, after which, thety re-boxed them and put them on store shelves. So lots of little girls got Barbie Dolls who talked like men about war and fighting...and lots of boys got "fighting man" dolls who would say (in a prissy girl voice), "Math is harrrd."

Here's film:

John Cage's work is really important to me. In addition to introducing "chance operations" into his work, his Zen-influenced attitude towards making art and living in the world have inspired and emboldened a lot of my play in the worlds of theater and dance.

In this video, which is from a 1960 American TV show called "I'VE GOT A SECRET," American celebrities of the time play a game of trying to figure out what a "mystery guest's" secret is. So there's the American TV game to see (in all its hokey splendor), but also John Cage's compositon, which I find delightful for how seriously it takes play.

If this isn't embedded, visit it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U

Flanagan describes Henri Matisse as a "traditional artist" and I want to register my disagreement. His painting so offended the mainstream critics of his day that they referred to it as "fauvism," the work of "wild animals." Although he used paint and canvas, his strategies for representation were wildly opposed to the impressionists, whose pretty canvases his playfully oppose.

Consider this painting of his wife and its play with color.

http://ayay.co.uk/background/paintings/henri_matisse/portrait-of-the-green-stripe/