Ron Mueck, Couple Under an Umbrella, 2013
@kryzb
Someone told me that they’d heard artist Lawrence Weiner at the exposition saying “I’m still looking for something that changes my world.” I could have told Weiner that not ten feet from his own pretty good Documenta contribution, in the rotunda of the Fridericianum, nine stone figures made in Afghanistan around 4,500 years ago were the most powerful forms in the entire show. They blew me away with their loving attentive masterful detail, scale, feel for material, line, shape, density, body-language, nobility, and individuality. These figures altered my internal world forever and are now permanently installed in my inner-museum, reverberating with all the other objects there. But I didn’t tell Weiner, because I’m sort of afraid of his intelligence, and of the way he always has a coat draped over his shoulders like it’s a cape.
“Everyone is frightened of copyright. Ubuweb simply acts like copyright doesn’t exist: we just ignore it. Everything on Ubu is free. We don’t touch money. The site is run by students and volunteers, and our server space and bandwidth is donated by universities. Ubu has discovered an economic gray zone by hosting out-of-print and hard-to-find items that aren’t valuable, economically speaking. It’s mostly artists’ ephemera and although it might not be worth a lot of money, intellectually and historically it’s priceless. The only value of the avant-garde is artistic and political.”
Kenneth Goldsmith, founder of UbuWeb
Manuel Palou, 5 Million Dollars 1 Terabyte, 2011
5 Million Dollars 1 Terabyte is a sculpture consisting of a 1 TB Black External Hard Drive containing $5,000,000 worth of illegally downloaded files. A full list of the files with clickable download links can be found here.
(Rhizome, via deleteyourself)
HOIST by Matthew Barney
Part of the Destricted series, 2006
‘Hoist’ describes the encounter between the two central characters of the film; the so-called ‘Green Man’ and a fifty-ton deforestation Caterpillar truck under which he is suspended. Following the three acts of traditional film narrative, it is structured according to the three phases of description, situation and condition.
While the initial two phases relate to the definition of ‘Hoist’ as an “an apparatus or method for lifting a load and shifting it laterally by an elevating means applied through a support from which a flexible member freely suspends a load engager,” the third or final condition of the film suggests the imperfect consummation of the human and the mechanistic.