Sugar And Spice And All Things Nice

The Pink and Blue Projects by JeongMee Yoon:

The Pink and Blue Projects were initiated by my five-year-old daughter, who loves the color pink so much that she wanted to wear only pink clothes and play with only pink toys and objects. I discovered that my daughter’s case was not unusual. In the United States, South Korea and elsewhere, most young girls love pink clothing, accessories and toys. This phenomenon is widespread among children of various ethnic groups regardless of their cultural backgrounds. Perhaps it is the influence of pervasive commercial advertisements aimed at little girls and their parents, such as the universally popular Barbie and Hello Kitty merchandise that has developed into a modern trend. Girls train subconsciously and unconsciously to wear the color pink in order to look feminine.

Sorted

As mentioned in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, I’ve set up a flickr group called Sorted Books inspired by Nina Katchadourian. Here is my latest one:

Come along and join us.

After The Deluge

It rains incessantly in London – not a day, not an hour without rain, a deluge that has now lasted for years and changed the way people travel, their clothes, leisure activities, imagination and desires. They dream about infinitely dry deserts.

I went to the opening of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058 at Tate Modern tonight. I’ll be honest, the initial attraction was that they always have good booze. And yes, the wine was very good. However, as the early reports of the show did the rounds this morning it soon became clear that the installation was only blooming science fiction! I can’t escape…

You would be hard pressed to identify any link to JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, the novel Gonzalez-Foerster explicitly references. It resembles less a shelter than the garden shed of a giant artist, filled with cast-off reproductions of other artists. In this context the ranks of bunk beds with their lonely texts seem lost and pointless. (For those keeping score at home The Carhullan Army does not feature but rather surprisingly Vurt does. There is also the unlikely juxtapostion of Jean-Luc Goddard, Andrei Tarkovsky and Brian De Palma.)

The Turbine Hall is so inhumanly large that it is hard to make an impression on it. TH.2058 lacks any of the immediate visceral impact that made Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project so popular. Upstairs at the opening of an exhibition by Cildo Meireles it was a different kettle of fish though. It too takes partial inspiration from Wells and Borges but, in his own words, aspires to simplicity, directness, openness and interaction and achieves this in great measure. It succeeds in connecting in a way that TH.2058 cannot approach. Particularly exciting are Through 1983-9 and Fontes 1992/2008.

Seizure

I went to see Down The Rabbit Hole this morning. It was very bitty in the way these things often are and contained some nice imagery without adding up to much. I did like the house band, The Molotovs, though.

Afterwards I saw something truly amazing:

This is Seizure by Roger Hiorns:

The initial structural alterations effected the transformation of Flat 159 into a completely watertight tank, reinforced by steelwork on the outside, with its upper surface open and accessible – through holes punched through the ceiling – to the flat above. The super-saturated copper sulphate solution itself was prepared onsite. Hundreds of bags of the chemical powder were mixed with very hot water in large steel tanks. More than 70,000 litres of the solution made in this way were eventually pumped into Flat 159, to fill it to the brim. 

Awesome.