Hi, we're OK Great, a tight-knit crew of designers, writers + artists, hell-bent on delivering the best in art, design and culture. The world is a big pile of awesome. We're the spoon. Dig in.
Monika Patuszynska has been working in porcelain ceramics for over ten years now. A Polish artist, she has begun experimenting with the timeline of her process; namely, working backwards for form. Instead of beginning with casting and molding, she’s leaving that as one of the last acts. In her latest line, Transformy, you can see that Patuszynska has created something entirely new and exciting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it and I surely have never posted about ceramics – it usually doesn’t make my head turn like this has.
Patuszynska, after many years of creating sleekly functional pieces (that you might find at an upscale retail store in Helsinki, maybe?) has decided to embrace the jagged imperfections of the unknown. It looks natural, like eroding caverns, evokes time and history in one bowl. I really like exploring her work on her site – to see how far she’s come from simpler bowls and plates. It’s exciting to see the progression. Perhaps it’s not the ideal tea time mug, but isn’t it a hell of a lot more interesting than that?
Obrist is a famed curator—one to look up to and be influenced and inspired by—both for his extraordinary ability to interview, but also generally for his breadth of knowledge and for being THE person to talk to about curating.
A: How do you go about putting together group exhibits?
H: I think it’s very much inspired by John Cage. Cage said that during a period of time he doesn’t just make music, but he also writes texts, he makes etchings, and a whole list of other things, and he does them in a different way so it’s not a linear situation, and I think with me it’s also overlapping a lot of layers. I’m not just a curator of exhibitions, but I write texts, I make interviews, I do films, I organize panels, and symposiums, and conferences, and research, so it’s a lot of parallel realities. It’s very non linear and then within these overlapping layers all of a sudden things emerge. And mostly it starts with a conversation with an artist. If there is an umbilical cord, it’s because I’ve got a very strong proximity to artists and that’s how ideas pop out.
//Zero1Magazine is a great read all throughout—site a little slow to load but worth the wait.
Apart from being home to the greatest soccer club on the planet (keep dreaming Evertonians), Liverpool is also a city with a flourishing art scene. Especially when it comes to the performing arts. Produced by the renowned street theatre company, Royal De Luxe, The Sea Odyssey is ‘a magical tale of love, loss and reunion played out on a gigantic scale’. Basically, giant puppets with crazy pulley systems stormed the streets of Liverpool this weekend to the awe of thousands of onlookers. How awesome is that?
Santiago Salvador is definitely not a new name but here’s some of his more recent work that I hadn’t seen yet. Continuing with beautiful color hues and multiplicity, and with his talent.
I honestly think that great literature (and David Simon’s The Wire) can save the world. But, ours is currently a world of blogs, tweets, instagram, status updates and cat videos. There is a sort of loss that we are suffering, not to mention a lapse in Monday afternoon productivity due to…well, in my case, it is probably cats. I’m not sure we’ve seen the dividends of this suffering just yet, but I can imagine there will be less and less books like Lolita being published in the future. Unless someone turns Lolita into a fucking zombie OH GOD IN HEAVEN PLEASE DON’T DO THAT.
Lately, I’m longing for something very far away from a computer screen. I’m looking for evidence of a human hand connected to a human brain and heart. The best proof is often found in the scribbles and scratches in the margins. Just look at Nabokov’s butterflies above. He had an obsession that wouldn’t quit, even here when he was working on a translation of the Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. It’s like seeing Picasso’s brushstrokes in a museum. It’s thrilling to be that close to his moving hand. Most of the time, we can’t get that close to a writer’s hand. Unless, you look in the margins of their working manuscripts.
The above, is a page from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. I love knowing what he wanted to rework, how he crossed out sections, how some words had to be cobbled out.
And this scene from The Godfather – Coppola uses TWO colored pens here! And all those arrows, all that movement while there is eating and shooting! I love it.
Maybe this is the same reason why some ladies throw their panties on stage at a Poison concert (and yes, some ladies are still doing it). Maybe we all just want to get a piece of us a little closer to the things we love. For me, it’s my eyes on beautiful words and ideas.
Though, back in the day, if Faulkner was playing the Arena, I may have thrown a pair his way.
P.S. of course, there is a Tumblr for this and that. That’s our world of today in a nut-shell, baby.
I love this series, titled Something’s Happening. Sehorn, a Minneapolis based artist, does lots of rad collage work.
I also love the collective he’s part of. And this is why: “Our focus is on collaborative works and initiatives. All work documented on this website was created by two or more artists working together. We have found that collectively we are stronger than individually.”
I just got waaaaaay too excited about this when I read about it on Creative Review’s blog (which, by the way, if that shit is not in your google reader, you are missing out).
The Ri Channel is a new online project by the Royal Institution showcasing the very best science videos from the Ri and around the web with an aim to “connect people to the world of science.” Well, if it looks this good and Carl Sagan is on the front page, I’m sold. And definitely connected.
