LINDSAY JOY HAMILTON » There

A new fascination…

lindsayjoy — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:31:35 +0000

Sebastian Horsley…a dandy, artist and someone who actually shocks me. I’m in love.

Sebastian Horsley Interview from Steve Glashier on Vimeo.

I stumbled across this very disturbing product;

lindsayjoy — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:34:21 +0000

This actually exists? This is a REAL product?

Somehow this corporation has managed to create a product which makes a woman’s smell consumable. I cannot really say why I have such an violent and sad reaction to this product. Could it be that it is an organic, natural, bodily fluid only present and accessible in intimate moments?

I can guarantee there is no product equivalent to Vulva marketed to women. (Eau de Teste???) I hypothesize why; it’s twisted and creepy for numerous reasons. Most women would like to know the person they smell. By nature, scent is intimate and personal. A bottled bodily fluid from some company is artificial intimacy and suggests some sort of power struggle. The company is capitalizing on the alienation between the sexes and has created a product which is based on the most personal of scents without actual intimate interaction. It allows access to such personal fluids without the having to communicate with a person, removing the woman completely from the equation. I think my biggest problem with this is that it gives the illusion of intimacy but further alienates men and women from each other. Something as private and personal as a woman’s vaginal smell becomes available on the market lends to the notion that a woman can be bought.

A human’s smell cannot be commodified. This company is attempting to commodify something which cannot be commodified; the intimate, personal and uniquely female experience.

I don’t want to appear prudish. I do not think the smell of a woman is dirty nor the appreciation of the scent. It can be very enjoyable thing to share between lovers. I do think the company is exploiting the sexually marginalized and that is where the shame should lie.

On a humorous note, I wonder how they bottle Vulva? I was immediately reminded to this Kids in the Hall skit “Husk Musk”

Thought Provoking essay by Derrick Jensen

lindsayjoy — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:00:13 +0000

Published on Wednesday, July 8, 2009 by Orion Magazine

Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change

by Derrick Jensen

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”

Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.

I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.

So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.

The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

Derrick Jensen is an activist and the author of many books, most recently What We Leave Behind and Songs of the Dead.

The one thing Jensen forget to mention is the military responsibility contributing to environmental decay.

Interesting article about Seattle and Vancouver art

lindsayjoy — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:11:45 +0000

The Vancouver Problem

Why is Vancouver art so much better than art here? A rant to get the conversation started.

by Jen Graves

Rachel Topham/Vancouver Art Gallery

VANCOUVER ART GALLERY, OBSCURED BY A FOUNTAIN The mannequins in the windows are part of Erica Stocking’s site-specific installation Window Display, 2009.

Seattle art has a Vancouver problem. The two cities are close: Vancouver is only 136 miles away, just across the Canadian border. They’re comparable in size. But Vancouver art is better. “Better” in this case means (a) Vancouver art is connected to the larger world, and therefore to universes of issues, peculiarities, styles, and ideas that serve the artists as well as the audiences, and (b) Vancouver art is connected to its own art history.

Vancouver: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. That’s the kind of city it is, according to Seattle curator Eric Fredericksen. He’s right: While Seattle artists often find themselves trapped inside the city—or move away, to Chicago or New York or L.A., in order to expand—Vancouver artists have both local and international careers. Paradoxically, this expansiveness is fueled by self-reflection: Vancouver art is known to itself. In Seattle, nothing seems to stick, but over the last half-century, Vancouver art has consciously developed and stretched its own art history—in landmark exhibitions and great public debates, in writing and teaching by artists. During that same time, Seattle art has been marked by fascinating experiments followed by wholesale forgettings, ultimately forming a sequence of events with as many losses as gains.

For instance, how has Seattle art built on the legacy of 1969, when Lucy Lippard filled the whole city—starting with Seattle Art Museum and moving outward—with the unbelievably experimental conceptual-art exhibition 557,087 (titled after the population of the city at the time and including artists whose names in the intervening years have become hallowed internationally: John Baldessari, Eva Hesse, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren, Walter De Maria, and Adrian Piper, just to name a few)? How has Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, on a formerly oil-soaked site, followed up on the way King County led the national discussion about earthworks and abused environments in a 1979 symposium with eight artists, which culminated in major commissions out in Kent and SeaTac (by Herbert Bayer and Robert Morris, respectively) now barely acknowledged? There’s also an entire buried history of experimental performance art that raged through 1970s Seattle—a history that seems unknown to contemporary Seattle performance-based artists such as SuttonBeresCuller, Greg Lundgren, PDL, Wynne Greenwood, and Anne Mathern, probably because it was barely documented, let alone passed down in art schools, museums, and artist-run galleries.

Seattle has been a great art town at various points in its history. But today, the city’s art scene has no such signature. No signature at all, even—except “pluralism,” that horribly genericizing umbrella that encouraged the complacency of every so-so art scene in the country through the late ’90s and early ’00s. (Aside! Believing that humans should have equal rights does not equate to believing that works of art are created equal: In art and culture, unlike in class matters, elitism is merit based.)

Today, Seattle artists seldom show abroad, and when they do, they are noted only for their anonymity. Reviewing a Philadelphia group show in the New York Times last month, Roberta Smith named local star Jeffry Mitchell one of a handful of “artists with little art-world profile” (why don’t you lend him some, Roberta?).

“So, have you guys heard of Jeffry Mitchell?” I asked Kathleen Ritter and Daina Augaitis last week in Vancouver. The three of us were sitting high on a set of salvaged-wood bleachers built by the father-sons artist collective Cedric, Nathan, and Jim Bomford. The Bomfords are included in the exhibition How Soon Is Now, a group show of new art from British Columbia at Vancouver’s art museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, curated by Ritter. Augaitis is the chief curator at the museum.

No, they hadn’t heard of Jeffry Mitchell.

Meanwhile, the leading lights of Seattle curating (and attentive Seattle audiences) all know these names: Tim Lee, Mark Soo, Kevin Schmidt, Hadley + Maxwell, Isabelle Pauwels, and Gareth Moore. These are some of Vancouver’s young(ish) artists, two of whom—Pauwels and Moore—are on the six-person short list of the Henry Art Gallery’s new $12,500 Brink award, along with two Seattle artists and two from Portland. The winner of the award will be announced April 17. Whoever wins, by crossing the border the Henry is implicitly encouraging Seattle to compete on a higher level, to step up its game.

The Henry should step up its game by exhibiting all six short listers rather than just the winner, while the Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland art museums should all start reconceptualizing the meaning of “regional,” like the Henry is doing, and quick. (The “inclusion” of such places as Idaho and Montana in Tacoma Art Museum’s biennial, for instance, reflects a fake constituency and has fake results. Art is now and has always been a city game. The art “region” is along or connected to the I-5 corridor, and in most ways, Seattle has more in common with Los Angeles than Spokane. Also, while 30 Montana and Idaho artists applied to this year’s TAM biennial, zero made it in. This makes no sense. And it helps to explain why TAM’s biennial this year, as in the past, also makes no sense and provides few advantages for the artists or the audience.)

It’s not that Vancouver is a romantic place full of geniuses, although it does have a crush of world-famous artists led by early photo-conceptualists Ian Wallace, Ken Lum, Jeff Wall, and Rodney Graham. But the success of today’s developing Vancouver artists is not their links to those guys. It’s that they are connected in all directions—to other times as well as other places (especially European centers; Vancouver, the only major West Coast city, is Canada’s Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, and L.A. all in one)—while Seattle artists float. The fact that Vancouver does not have a strong commercial art market has endowed the city with more experimental art (as has a vigorously federally funded artist-run-center program that puts artists in the roles of presenters as well as creators). It’s rare for a Vancouver up-and-comer not to be represented by a gallery in, say, Berlin, or Rotterdam, or London, or Munich, which means the artists spend time in cultures not their own.

“Being an artist in Vancouver kind of pushes you into realizing that there’s a larger world,” Vancouver curator Augaitis said. “When we were doing studio visits for the Baja to Vancouver show”—it surveyed art up and down the West Coast of North America, showing at Seattle Art Museum in 2003—”the artists here were just so much more articulate. They had not only a knowledge of their history here, but also of international practices.”

The observation she’s making about Seattle artists might be made of Americans in general.

So what is contemporary art in Vancouver really like? One of its marked features is a relationship with popular culture, especially music and film. A highlight of How Soon Is Now at the VAG is a Hadley + Maxwell installation that combines historical footage of the Rolling Stones, figurative sculpture made by arranging recording-studio equipment, and a geometric painting with a lightbulb that depicts the rest of the installation in miniaturized abstract. The installation, which changes its format every time it’s exhibited, is tight, funny, clever, and improvisational. It quite rocks.

You might say Vancouver art is more fashionable than Seattle’s, and this happens to be true right now because of the way the city’s photo-conceptual tradition lines up with what Times critic Smith calls art’s current “religion of Minimal-Conceptual-Relational art.” The weakest works in How Soon Is Now do feel like trendy, compulsory replays of classic moves from the conceptual-relational line.

But plenty of other works are art- historically informed and also brilliantly topical, ranging in subject matter from poverty in East Vancouver (Paul Wong) to a First Peoples heritage (Raymond Boisjoly; other Vancouver artists not in this show, such as Brian Jungen and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, also tackle tribal traditions using very contemporary means), the invisibility of economics (Antonia Hirsch), the death of a tame jaguar named Richard (Allison Hrabluik), trusting your senses even inside a museum (Mark Soo), and the difference between the Democratic National Convention and Burning Man/the problem of white men wearing Tupac shirts/whether art historians are god (Dan Starling). Even when Seattle is the subject, Vancouver artists are sometimes more on top of it than we are: In last year’s survey of young Vancouver artists at the University of British Columbia’s Belkin Gallery, one of the subjects, explored in photographs by Alex Morrison, was the scene in the Vancouver streets as the Hollywood film Battle in Seattle was being filmed. No Seattle artists were on the scene—another case of its own history passing Seattle by.

It’s true that Vancouver has a cooler relationship to materials than Seattle (given Seattle’s craft history in ceramics), but there are established exceptions, such as Liz Magor (who showed painted gypsum sculptures recently at the Henry, and whose tutelage has influenced generations of Vancouver artists). How Soon Is Now is not all videos, photos, and clever conceptual setups. There are figurative expressionists, too: The standout is Luanne Martineau, whose dangling, twisted, and severed body parts of yarn and wool are part Francis Bacon, part Philip Guston, and part ’60s handbag.

Another Vancouverism evident in How Soon Is Now is the warm relationship between museum and artists. Artists known for, say, abstraction or photography experiment with text or sound in the museum show, obviously feeling free. The museum is unfazed by permeatingly loud sounds, piles of dirt that have to be moved every few weeks, and elaborate constructions that break through walls—and a giant flag by an artist (a late-night-TV test pattern by Aaron Carpenter titled Good Night) flies on the flagpole out front. The art generally behaves as if it’s at home.

In Seattle, museums seem to grant legitimacy to local artists grudgingly. At the VAG, Vancouver artists have a vital place: Upstairs from How Soon Is Now, contemporary local artists are mixed naturally into a show of canonic abstract art. One great moment has two gargantuan painted black circles, a 2009 work by Neil Campbell, staring down a violet disc by Robert Irwin, one of the holiest relics in postwar American art. And conversely, when the museum presents a touring exhibition—like WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution last year—the city’s artists, art lovers, and other art institutions rally together to create a sustained focus on a series of issues. (The VAG also added ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s Vancouver feminists to its installation of WACK!)

We—I include myself—have work to do. I am not quite sure what it is, but I think it starts here.

I found this article here: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-vancouver-problem/Content?oid=1220602

Post: Gadgets in Public Space

lindsayjoy — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:08:28 +0000

I came across this video of Artist’s Post, who claim to place gadgets in public space for use of the public. Maybe Sweden doesn’t have the same homelessness situation or drastic difference of class that Vancouver has, but its seems this gadget is meant for street people. Yet how are street people, who have very limited access to the Internet supposed to know these boxes are in their space, never mind knowing to open on with a beer bottle. The beer bottle key seems a bit assumptive and maybe laws are different there then in Vancouver, but walking around with booze is susceptible to being harassed by the police. This work is a nice gesture, but it is a band aid solution to a social problem which should have more attention. Maybe that’s the strength of the work, at least it draws attention to the people sleeping in the street. What do you think?


PO 012 from post on Vimeo.

"we are post. installing gadgets to send messages in public space.
giving power to the people. converting static settings of your everyday
life into buttons you are asked to press. creating little wonders and
rumors for urban fairytales. we aren't street art. we are post."

Huichol Art and rituals

lindsayjoy — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:00:48 +0000

Huichol or Wixaritari (“the people”) are the Indigenous people in and around Puerto Vallarta. They are a peyote people, and have a long history in Mexico. I don’t want to write too much about them because I don’t know enough and I don’t want to misrepresent. Here’s a few website about their culture;

Huichol Indian History and Culture

Indigenous People’s Literature

The Huichol Centre

but then again, who knows who wrote these and if the information is factual. I’ve taken too many Non Western art history classes to know how problematic writing about other cultures can and almost always will be.

The Huichol’s have very brightly coloured intricate art works and can be found all over Puerto Vallarta. They use yarn and beads to create their art. Here’s a few shots taken from the Peyote People Art Gallery in Puerto Vallarta:

The Peyote People Art Gallery in Puerto Vallarta

the Bead work

this work is not from the Peyote People Store, but is another example of Huichol bead work

the Yarn works

Psychedelic creatures also made by Huichol's

All these works express the potential of Art when spirituality, cultural imagery and hallucinogens are embraced. It’s a delight for the visual cortex, I think.

The gentleman who owns the Peyote People, Kevin Simpson, informed me of Jacinto Lopez Ramirez. Simpson called Ramirez “the Huichol equivalent to Norval Morrisseau“. Here is a small sculpture Ramirez has on display in his gallery.

Jacinto Lopez Ramirez performing a cultural baptism

I also wanted to share another part of Huichol culture; the Huichol Flying Birdman ritual

We came across this performance one night while walking the Malecon in Puerto Vallerta. After some minor research I found out this is a Huichol ritual preformed on a pole that is 25 metres high. The shaman heads the ritual by dancing and playing his flute on the very top of the pole and once the prayers are said then they descend spiraling down towards the ground. The shaman playing the flute the whole time. The ritual is meant to represent the earth and heavens meeting, the flute is both the birdsong and the voice of god. The four others seated at all the different directions represent the areas of the world meeting. Its a very poetic ritual, with many elements of danger. It was a moving experience for me. It sounds so great with the flute and the waves. Here’s the video I shot of the performance:

Chiapas Dancers In Puerto Vallarta

lindsayjoy — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:00:38 +0000

I have so many photographs from my trip to Puerto Vallarta, but I had so much work to do
after I returned I’ve slacked on putting most of them up. Here’s a few shots from the Chiapas
variety show we watched one evening.

A Cock fight. No one clapped after this part of the show.

I could not resist this one…

lindsayjoy — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:07:40 +0000

Please take the time to watch this amazing video!

I admit this video is tremendously silly, but it is also a true feat of organization between animal and human. Truly unbelievable actually.

I always wondered what shepherds did to pass the time while tending their flock.

Christopher Sivak Premiere with Nu:BC

lindsayjoy — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:00:59 +0000

I’ve been very busy and there is still so much to do! I’ve been singing with some very fine musicians in a new cover band lately. We’re covering some great songs. I’ll keep posting about it, especially when our first gig comes around, but that won’t be until I’m done school. We are going to be doing a few songs at the ANZA club’s open mic this Thursday if anyone is interested in hearing what we’ve been working on. Be there at 10, and you won’t miss us. I’ll post something about that later…like when we find a proper band name.

I’ve been doing lots of stuff (all but spending time in my studio). I attended Music on Main “A Month of Tuesdays”: Classical Music at the Cellar Jazz. Christopher Sivak had a world premiere of commissioned composition A Perfect Composition preformed by the Nu:BC Collective. Sivak is a very talented musician and composer, graduating from UBC‘s composition program. When asked what his composition is about,(I’m paraphrasing here) he said that in our culture we experience moments of collectivism and separation. He gave an example of a city bus. When we are on a bus, we are separate from the other passengers, but collectively we are all on the same bus. He represents his oscillation through music. In an orchestra, different instruments harmonize, follow a melody and blend with each other. When an instrument takes a solo, or in contemporary music, goes against the melody or other instruments, that instrument sticks out and separates itself from the others. Sivak composed with this in mind. Conceptual music! It was wonderful to see musicians conceptualizing as visual artist do. It truly enriched my experience of orchestral “classical” music and it shed light upon the twin nature of contemporary music and visual art . It was a fantastic evening. I would recommend this snazzy little restaurant, for the food (Chef Elizabeth Reid is very talented as well) and the great music. (I worked at the Cellar for a year when I first moved to Vancouver. They are very nice people)

Art inside the Cellar byJennifer Brouse

Christopher Sivak

Go Music Vancouver!

Puerto Vallarta, the Second

lindsayjoy — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:00:54 +0000

There is so much to talk about so I’m going to have to break up the blogging into different posts. We have done so much, and I still feel

like I could spend a few more weeks here.

Here are the places we’ve been to;

El Centro Vallarta

Ixtapa

The Excursions;

Sarape Boat Curse to Los Arcos, and Waterfalls in Quimixto

Bucerias Market

Surfing in Sayulita

Crocodile Sanctuary on campus at the University of Guadalajara

Los Acros Hotel for traditional Chipias dancing

Viejo Vallarta Artwalk

Sailing Whale watching SCAM

Lots of lounging sea side

a great game of beach volleyball with Drewski

bowling in a bowling alley which is identical to the bowlerama in the Big Lebowski

A stroll through a Mexican cemetery

reading by the pool

LOTS OF BEER DRINKING

a sun allergy which has forced me to hide out…

Mexican Strippers rule

I’ve had so much fun, it is going to be hard to leave. I feel like I’m going to have to leave a bit of my heart here so I’ll have to come back to get it.