August 13th, 2006
My friends and I were talking about erection from a deadman and I googled for it.
It was classically admitted that, when a man was sentenced to death and
hanged, he sometimes experienced erection and ejaculation. This phenomenon
is explained by the interruption of descending controls through the spinal
cord. Erection is an important symptom of acute medullar (spinal cord)
trauma.
Ejaculation can be initiated by stress. Fighter pilots, after having
escaped to very dangerous situtations, sometimes report that they
ejaculated during escape manoeuvers. This is explained by very high levels
of epinephrine, the hormone released by stress…..
Read more here, http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/jun2001/991684262.Me.r.html
Luc Ronchi, M.D., Anesthesiology, Anesthesiologie Hopital
Posted in Graphic
August 12th, 2006
Philippe Pasqua’s oversized and heavily worked canvases have impact and intrigue. A self taught painter, Pasqua creates large paintings and drawings, confrontational in size and intensity. The exhibition consists of eight paintings and three drawings, all larger than life, vibrant and actively rendered; each work a force to reckon with on its own. The large faces in the exhibition are like portraits as landscapes filling the viewer’s line of sight, noticeably devoid of identifiable backgrounds or settings. Working originally from photographs of selected individuals, invariably from societies fringes, there is a removal of viewer from subject that is intensified by a detached rendering; a repetitive, textural overall surface. Who you see or where they are, any signification to ground the images in a familiar space is absent. Whatever relationship the artist has with his subjects, is not of focus here. The viewer is left to make their own conclusions as to what it is they see, what they are experiencing. Pasqua presents his vision in a frenzy of brush strokes. The surface of the painting has become the subject and focus of Pasqua’s work. The painterly strokes aggravate the canvas, almost brutally rendering the image, while his color choices, bloody reds and bruised blues create an undeniable vibrance to the surface of the canvas. The drawings are just as agitated; scribbled on as much as they are rubbed away, full of the action of creating.
The terms “abject”, “haunting”, and “disturbing” have been often used to describe Pasqua’s works. Lucien Freud wrote, “The role of the artist is to disturb the human being.”
Born 1965 in Grasse, France.
Lives and works in France.
http://www.patrickpainter.com/artists/Pasqua_Philippe/2006-07/index.html
Posted in Graphic
August 11th, 2006
Thanks for the e-mail from Michael Gambale for telling me on this! Magic Propaganda Mill! Crazy colors, crazy messed up, crazy collages!
http://www.mpmill.com
Posted in Graphic
August 11th, 2006
” Our philosophy is about reaching back to move forward. We have something different to say with a sensibility that is both old and new. There is a vintage and a modern edge to our clothes.
We feel that the uniform is dead. Men are taking a more individualistic and personal approach to dressing. They are mixing dressy with casual, resulting in an eclectic look that suits their personality. “
Fall/Winter 2000 marked the debut of John Varvatos, a Men’s lifestyle collection that focuses on signature detailing and an uncompromising standard of old world craftsmanship. Comprised of tailored clothing, sportswear, furnishings, accessories and footwear, John Varvatos has an eclectic point of view that pairs the luxurious with the casual, ultimately creating a look of easy elegance.
Michigan native John Varvatos joined Polo Ralph Lauren in 1983. He was recruited by Calvin Klein in 1990 and was appointed head of menswear design, responsible for the launch of the Men’s collection and the cK brand. In 1995, he returned to Polo as Vice-President in charge of Men’s design for all Polo Ralph Lauren brands. During this period he created and launched the highly successful Polo Jeans Company. It was during these formative years that he nurtured and developed the business skills to compliment his creative foundation, both of which have been critical for the leadership of a successful fashion company.
In 1999, John launched his Fall Winter 2000 Men’s collection to critical acclaim. In June 2000, he was recognized by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) with the Perry Ellis Award for New Menswear Designer. In June 2001, John won his second CFDA award, Menswear Designer of the Year. This successive honor is an unprecedented achievement in the menswear category. In 2005 John was once more recognized by the CFDA with the Menswear Designer of the Year Award.
In September of 2000, within months after the showing of his first collection, the first freestanding John Varvatos store opened in Soho. The John Varvatos New York flagship was followed with boutiques in Los Angeles in September 2002, Las Vegas in August 2003, Short Hills, New Jersey in September 2003, and Costa Mesa, California in September 2005. In November of 2005, the original Soho store relocated to a prestigious landmark building on the corner of Spring and Greene Streets. This 5,000 square foot gallery-like emporium situated on two levels, provides a rich environment for showcasing the expanded lifestyle collection. Plans are also in development to open additional John Varvatos stores in major U.S. markets, coupled with an ongoing expansion on an international level.
Mr. Varvatos, known for his sensibility of casual modern elegance expanded his influence from looking good to feeling good with the introduction of John Varvatos fragrance and SKIN. John Varvatos in partnership with Zirh International, a subsidiary of Shiseido International Corporation celebrated the first John Varvatos Men’s fragrance with an exclusive US launch in March 2004. In Spring 2005, Zirh International also launched John Varvatos SKIN featuring a twelve item assortment of ultra-high-end skincare products. John Varvatos fragrance and SKIN are carried in all John Varvatos boutiques and a global rollout continues in luxury retail stores.
http://www.johnvarvatos.com
Right-click to save the runway clip here.
Posted in Graphic
August 7th, 2006
I don’t know what to write but these are from his website but I love the details and workmanship.
1976: Born in Athens
1992-96: Studies graphic arts / fashion design. At the same time, he works as a model and signs an exclusive contract with Vivienne Westwood.
1996: He creates his own haute-couture atelier in Athens.
1997: Presentation of ten haute couture creations in Down Town Gallery, one of which is a dress decorated with 6.500 Swarovski crystals; the dress was photographed for the catalogue of the Swarovski House in Austria and was later worn by Greek pop star, singer Anna Vissi.
- Creation of the ready-to-wear line labelled: CHRISTOFOROS KOTENTOS; it is available all over Greece and Cyprus in the PRINCE OLIVER chain of shops.
- Launching of the CHRISTOFOROS KOTENTOS collection in a Milan showroom and exportation of the collection to 14 cities around the world, namely: Monte Carlo, Saint Tropez, Moscow, Tokyo, Osaka, Lisbon, Larnaca, Limasol, Marbella, London, Milan, Paris, Lugano, Kuwait, Athens.
2005: Presentation of his collection at the Berlin Fashion Week.
C.KOTENTOS is one of the most avant-garde young Greek designers. His creations have been chosen by many ladies of the Greek show biz, while actress Cameron Diaz has also shown a preference for his creations.
http://www.christoforoskotentos.com
Check out http://filepmotwary.blog.com/710233/ to see more backstage work too.
Posted in Graphic
August 6th, 2006
Gori de Palma was born in 2004 with his debut in Barcelona Fashion Week with the collection ìConfusiÛnî, made on the whole of recycled 501 Leviís.
One of the main points in his creations is the Rock ën Roll influence, as well as punk (They said this is the last song, 2005), subcultures (ConfusiÛn, A/W 2004), comics or other epoches mouvements, SM and bondage (Die rote rechte hand and Fade to Black).
The collection shown this year, ìFallen Womanî, close the black trilogy, formed by ìDie rote rechte handî, Fade to Blackî and finally ìFallen Womanî in wich black is obviously the main colour.
Moreover presenting his collections, Gori de Palma has won Moda Vasca (first prize) or Art Jove (Palma de Mallorca) and has been invited to participate in different exhibitions and performances (La Trastienda, CÌrculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, Eurobijoux, mid-e Bilbao or La Santa Proyectos Culturales).
http://www.goridepalma.com/
Gori de Palma FW 2005 runway video
Posted in Graphic
August 6th, 2006
Once the aesthetic aspirations of a cultural epoch are achieved, one of two things happens. Either the movement self-destructs, its ideology torn down and replaced with a more salient one or else visual statements are pushed beyond the initial goal, towards a more extreme form of beauty than originally envisaged.
In art, Michelangelo is the most famous example of this. Unsatisfied by the resolution of single-point perspective and realisation of the classical nude achieved in his painting, Michelangelo’s later work progressed beyond reality, into convoluted compositions populated by figures with improbable physiques. For him, nature was not enough; only the visual complexity and emotional intensity of Mannerism could reach the extreme beauty he imagined.
The comparison may itself be extreme, but if there was ever a fashion equivalent of Michelangelo’s Mannerism, it is in the designs of Viktor & Rolf. Having mastered the technical requirements of haute couture in their early shows, the Dutch designers’ subsequent collections of ready-to-wear have radically extended the possibilities of what might be accepted as clothing. Multiple collars, stacked on top of each other like an armadillo, long, attenuated sleeves, oversize poke-your-eye-out cuffs with enormous buttons, asymmetrical shirt plackets, trouser legs emerging from evening gowns; this is the lexicon of exaggerated forms Viktor & Rolf drawn upon to create the most audacious garments in contemporary fashion.
Yet there is also a latent commercialism behind the Mannerist imperative that marks the designers out from other fashion extremists, maintaining Viktor & Rolf’s relevance to international fashion design and their market both. That they understand the politics of global fashion branding Viktor & Rolf made clear seasons ago, when in 1996 they launched a spurious fragrance, for which only the corporate identity and packaging existed. October’s Spring/Summer ’04 catwalk presentation saw them do it for real as their ribbon-strewn procession built into an acoustic crescendo, echoing the word ‘Flowerbomb’, the title of their new perfume.
Fashioned like a multi-faceted glass grenade, with the landmark V&R black seal as the pin, the Flowerbomb bottle is a perfect metaphor for the Viktor & Rolf paradox: latent violence laced with seductive elegance. Even the packaging has been carefully considered to represent the dual concerns. From a distance, the box looks like a Futurist car crash of force lines culminating in a central black splat. In the hand, though, it is a pretty arrangement of black and silver petersham ribbon on iridescent pink card, secured by the faux wax seal.
As fashion design struggles for ideas beyond recycling old ones and image-making yearns for new life outside stultifying re-touching, Flowerbomb poses the opposing twin options of aesthetic accomplishment: do we tear it all down or push it a little further?
Text by Penny Martin
http://www.showstudio.com/projects/shelf/flowerbomb.html
Posted in Graphic
August 6th, 2006
Nadav Kander was born in Israel in 1961, grew up in South Africa and now resides in London. He has established a respected reputation as both a commercial photographer (advertising, fashion) and as an art photographer. The body of work on display here demonstrates why. This is a remarkably diverse collection of photographs, as varied in genres (portraits, still lifes, landscapes) as in subject matter (prostitutes, movie stars, cityscapes, desertscapes). Most of the prints were selected from a monograph titled Beauty’s Nothing, which Kander abstracted from a poem by the mainstay of German spiritual transformation, Rainer Maria Rilke. The line appears in one of Rilke’s famous and powerful Duino Elegies: “Beauty’s Nothing/but the first touch of terror/we’re just able to endure/and we adore it so much/because it serenely distains destroy us.”
Part of what is so frightening about artistic beauty is that its creation requires varying degrees of detached, deliberate, even cold calculations. The art and act of photography, dependent by definition on a mechanical device, possesses the capacity to record whatever it points at in an indiscriminate and undifferentiated manner. Indeed, throughout this show, Kander’s work invokes the metaphor of “shooting” a picture, or “capturing” any given subject matter. Images feel forcefully manipulated into aesthetic and psychologically charged tableaux. In this stance, the works purposely establish an antagonistic relationship between the subject(ive photographer) and his object(ivized) “targets.”
For example, his pictures of seductively naked young Latina women, suggestive of prostitutes in what looks like downtrodden hotel rooms. seem at first straightforward enough. However, after viewing them for some time, the strength of these women’s characters and the purity of their souls leap off of each print, turning their staged seductive stares into liminal indictments all their own. After all, she has been exploited twice: by the mechanical gaze of the photographer and his camera, and by a morally and economically bankrupt social environment that has brought her to sell her body in the first place.
For Kander, the very act and end product of photography is manipulative and ambiguous by nature. It is as if the artist creates a puzzle for himself in each of these pictures, whose meaning he and the viewer struggle together to discover and internalize. In this sense, Kander’s stark and iridescently tinged urban landscapes, his series of gawky adolescents shot head on in bathing suits, his surreal, disembodied head shots of movie stars of a past era, even his cropped and extremely formal studies of women’s nude torsos (some voluptuous and healthy and others decrepit and ill) all sound an unmistakably existential tone. In one particularly mysterious photo, a woman in a bathing suite and bathing cap stands on the edge of a diving board perched over a glassy, metallic and exquisitely surrealistic sea, extending to meet an equally impersonal and impenetrable grey sky. She has reached the edge of eternity, making it easy for viewers to empathize with what must be a blend of primal dread and exhilarating freedom. “Who am I?” she seems to ask nobody in particular. “And who is taking my photograph and who will look at it?. . .and what do I do next?” Salient questions, one and all.
by Andy Brumer, http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles2001/Articles0601/NKanderA.html
http://www.nadavkander.com
Posted in Graphic
August 2nd, 2006
If
1 = 5
2 = 25
3 = 125
and
4 = 625
then
what’s
5 = ?
Tell me the answer!
Posted in Graphic
July 31st, 2006
Excerpt:
“The only thing the market liked better than a hot young artist was a dead hot young artist, and it got one in Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose working life of about nine years was truncated by a heroin overdose at the age of twenty-seven. His career, both actual and posthumous, appealed to a cluster of toxic vulgarities. First, the racist idea of the black as naif or rhythmic innocent, and of the black artist as “instinctual,” someone outside “mainstream” culture and therefore not to be rated in its terms: a wild pet for the recently cultivated collector. Second, a fetish about the freshness of youth, blooming among the discos of the East Side scene. Third, guilt and political correctness, which made curators and collectors nervous about judging the work of any black artist who could be presented as a “victim.” Fourth, art-investment mania. And last, the audience’s goggling appetite for self-destructive talent: Pollock, Montgomery Clift. All this gunk rolled into a sticky ball around Basquiat’s tiny talent and produced a reputation.
“Basquiat’s career was incubated by the short-lived graffiti movement, which started on the streets and subway cars in the early 1970s, peaked, fell out of view, began all over again in the 1980s, peaked again, and finally receded, leaving Basquiat and the amusingly facile Keith Haring as its only memorable exponents. Unlike Haring, however, Basquiat never tagged the subways. The son of middle-class Brooklyn parents, he had a precocious success with his paintings from the start. The key was not that they were “primitive,” but that they were so arty. Stylistically, they were pastiches of older artists he admired: Cy Twombly, Jean Dubuffet. Having no art training, he never tried to deal with the real world through drawing; he could only scribble and jot, rehearsing his own stereotypes, his pictorial nouns for “face” or “body” over and over again. Consequently, though Basquiat’s images look quite vivid and sharp at first sight, and though from time to time he could bring off an intriguing passage of spiky marks or a brisk clash of blaring color, the work quickly settles into the visual monotony of arid overstyling. Its relentless fortissimo is wearisome. Critics made much of Basquiat’s use of sources: vagrant code-symbols, quotes from Leonardo or Gray’s Anatomy, African bushman art or Egyptian murals. But these were so scattered, so lacking in plastic force or conceptual interest, that they seem mere browsing – homeless representation.
“The claims made for Basquiat were absurd and already seem like period pieces. ‘Since slavery and oppression under white supremacy are visible subtexts in Basquiat’s work ,’ intoned one essayist in the catalog to his posthumous retrospective at the Whitney Museum, ‘he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced.’ Another extolled his ‘punishing regime of self-abuse’ as part of ‘the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse asceticism to which he was so resolutely committed.’ Inverse asceticism, apparently, is PC-speak for addiction. There was much more in, so to speak, this vein. But the effort to promote Basquiat into an all-purpose inflatable martyr-figure, the Little Black Rimbaud of American painting, remains unconvincing.”
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/basquiat.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Basquiat
Posted in Graphic
July 30th, 2006
The next best thing since Hedi Slimane (Dior Homme), Jun Takahashi (Undercover), Ann Demeulmeester, Raf Simons, Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang, Verri, Rick Owens, Number Nine, Pascual Chen, Cloak, HAN SEUNG SOO, Kosmetique, Julian & Sophie, N.Hoolywood, Lad Musician and Tsubi.
PUDEL believes in the androgynous expression. We make gender free garments with clean cuts and conceptual detailing, mainly in monochrome shades.
Pudel was established during the autumn of 2004 as the result of intensive electronic communication between Sweden and the UK. Our clothes have been on exhibit in Berlin, Copenhagen and Stockholm, as well as in various showrooms in London and Tokyo. We have also collaborated with TOPSHOP in London / Oxford Circus.
Our second collection, ‘Reconstruction in Europe’ S/S 06, is currently available in selected shops in Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, the UK and Japan.
http://www.pudel.co.uk
Posted in Graphic
July 28th, 2006
Matias Klarwein was born on the 9th of April 1932 in Hamburg, Germany. His father Joseph (born Yusef Ben Menachem), was an architect working with the Bauhaus movement and his mother Elsa (born Elsa Kühne), was an opera singer. Mati emigrated with his parents to Israel (then Palestine) in 1934. During the formation of the new Israel, his father won the competition to construct the parliament building: the Knesset in Tel Aviv.
At the age of 17, Mati moved to Paris with his mother where he studied painting at the Academie Julian, the Beaux Arts, as well as with Fernand Leger (1949-51) and Ernst Fuchs (1952-54) with whom he learned the mixed technique of the 16th century Flemish school. He made several other fundamental friendships in France with such personalities as Kitty Lillaz, Boris Vian, and Salvador Dali. Mati obtained French nationality in 1965 with the help of Mrs. André Malraux.
Mati’s work included drawing, painting, writing, playing drums and guitar, and directing short and medium films and videos. Throughout the years, he worked, traveled and lived in many countries including: Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, North America, Morocco, Niger, Haiti, Jamaica, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Bahamas, Kenya, Senegal, Gambia, Cuba and Guatemala – more or less in that order. It follows that he spoke no less than six languages: English, French, Spanish, German & Hebrew with good notions in Arabic and Italian.
Mati Klarwein’s best known paintings are ‘Annunciation’, which was chosen for the cover of Santana’s album ‘Abraxas’, and the painting used by Miles Davis for his cover ‘Bitches Brew’ – also reproduced for Absolut Vodka’s ad campaign. His artwork has been widely shown in galleries in New York, Paris, and all over Spain. Mati’s most unique installation was the Aleph Sanctuary, a cubic room comprised of 68 paintings including the ‘Tree of Life’ requiring a guard at its entrance in the Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, California. During his last years, he had major retrospective shows in Madrid, Barcelona, Palma and Cadiz.
http://www.matiklarweinart.com/
Posted in Graphic
