art now 042# – Damien Hirst
Silkscreen
From an edition of 50.
Height: 60 inches
Width: 60 inches
art now 040# – Charles Broskoski
The piece explores internet-time, or how time passes on the internet, by providing a contrast to immediacy of online media. On his site, eight well known films (Pulp Fiction, Terminator 2 and When Harry Met Sally among them) play continuously on a fixed daily schedule whether users visit the site or not. The screen is black save only for the subtitles of the dialog.
via Rhizome
art now 039# – Robert Gibbings
Wood Engraving
From an edition of 50
Height: 7 inches
Width: 11.5 inches
art now 036# – Blind Twins, Saint-Mandé, France
These girls are blind and obviously twins. The gridded floor makes the space look like a prison cell. Blind or not, the girls present themselves with an elegance wich implies that beauty is a natural bodily quality indepedent of sight. This picture was taken in 1980 when Atwood was engaged in a study of the blind, for wich she was given the first W. Eugene Smith Award. Her pratice, as a documentary photographer, is to envolve herself with her subjects over a long period, for the sake of sympathy and accuracy. Her main concernos have been the marginalized and disadvantaged, and in 1997 she was awarded Leica’s Oskar Barnack Award for a study of women’s prisons worlwide. Of her three books published to date, two have been on the life of prostitutes in Paris and the third on conditions in the French Foreign Legion. Atwood has lived in France since 1971.
art now 035# – Child With Toy Granade In Central Park
The grenade, grimace and claw-like hand seen to point to a desperate future, hysterical and militarized. The picture works beacuse the strangeness of the boy is staged within a kindly natural scene; there is even a rhyme between those paired tree trunks and the child’s spindly legs. Arbu’s subject, here and elsewhere, is the discrepancy between imagined and idealized worlds, represented here by the trees and the sunlight in the park, and the violence apprently promised by the child. She imagined dystopia, but always regarded it from the point of view of the Garden of Eden. Arbu’s example – wich is known mainly though the eighty pictures published in Diane Arbus in 1972 – made a huge difference in the documentary photography, even if no one was able to repeat her achievement. A student of the influential Lisette Model in New York in the late 1950’s, she worked principally as a freelance magazine photographer during the 1960’s.
via Phaidon Photobook
