Art
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“Indie Won” (and Thus Is Dead?)
“You see, to the extent that indie meant anything, it was as its root word, independent. It was about seizing the means of production. Independently produced. Aesthetics can be imitated, ethics faked, attitudes mimicked, but large bureaucracies could not possibly…
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A Field Guide To Military Urbanism
“I mean, when you’re forced to smuggle, by sheer necessity of survival, due to forces completely outside of your own control, when the power to decide your own destiny has been taken from you (as a nation), can it really…
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One Widow’s Mural for Health Care
“These days you can usually find Regina Holliday in a parking lot between the BP station and the CVS near the Politics and Prose bookstore. She’s painting a 20-foot-high mural, showing her husband on his deathbed, to draw attention to…
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Diagnosing the Mad Cat Artist
This week the Rumpus will be in Yorkshire, England. Or at least the triumvirate will be. On exhibit there at the Chris Beetles gallery until September 13 will be the work of “cat artist” Louis Wain, who died in 1939.…
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Folded Paper II: Junior Jacquet
Some evoke the moai statues on Easter Island; others seem to be the spitting image of George Bush. Yet these little gems are made from (ready?) toilet paper rolls. Toilet paper rolls! It’s the artistic equivalent of making silk from…
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Folded Paper I: Sipho Mabona
My six-year-old son is obsessed with paper airplanes. There’s a giant pile of them on our dining room table. He varies the design, or makes them huge or so tiny he can hardly fold them. But he’s on to something.…
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Zak Smith in Conversation with Anthony Lister
Anthony Lister’s paintings are hard to describe–mostly because they’re so easy to describe. You could say Lister is a graffiti-artist who does paintings of comic book characters and other pop-culture icons in spray-paint, but that doesn’t explain why they look…
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The Rumpus Partly Visual Interview with Hilary Pecis and Elyse Mallouk
At what point does the viewer start seducing the artwork?
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Derrick Jensen’s Essay from The Time After
In the time after, when industrial civilization is a bitter and too-slowly-fading memory, a memory of a nightmare too atrocious to be believed by those who were not alive in the time before and so did not experience it and…
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Louise Bourgeois and Scheherazade
Louise Bourgeois is the rare artist whose orbit intersects with many big thinkers and personalities of the last century, while always remaining relevant and enduring. Not bad for ninety-seven. I love the way she hones her images and takes them…
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Doug Fogelson
I keep the first picture in mind, but I frame each new picture as if it’s its own composition, bearing in mind that it is related to what came before it and what’s coming after it.
