Banksy: The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill

Banksy (the only "superstar" artist that I know that has continued to live up to the hype) has recently designed a pet shop that includes fish sticks swimming in a fish tank, a chimpanzee watching chimp porn, sleeping leopard that turns out to be a fur coat, chicken McNuggets sipping barbeque sauce and hot dog hamsters. The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill is less than 300 square feet and can't hold more than 20 people at any one time. The inspiration for the show came when Banksy witnessed a chihuahua with a diamond collar being walked passed a homeless person. He wanted to bring forth the question why do we spoil some animals and murder others.

More images from Banksy's Village Petstore show.

Banksy recently put up three giant billboards in the Big Apple. All depicting the NYC mascot, one rat sports an "I heart New York" shirt at the corner of Grand and Wooster, another is found whitewashing the wall at Houston and Macdougal and the last rat at Howard and Broadway is holding a briefcase full of money accompanied with text that reads "Let them eat crack." In a statement Bansky comments, "I wanted to play the corporations at their own game, at the same scale and in the same locations. The advantage of billboard companies is that they'll let you write anything for money, even if what you write is questioning the ethics of letting someone write anything because they have money."

Roman Singer - Seeing in slow motion.

Signer’s works have acquired the label ‘time-sculpture’. They share traditional sculpture’s concern with the crafting of physical materials in three dimensions, but they extend that concern into what may or may not be characterised as the fourth dimension: the dimension of time. Time-sculpture investigates the transformation of materials through time, focusing the viewer’s attention on the experience of the event, the changes wrought, and the forces involved. Variously combining three-dimensional objects, live action, still photography and moving-image documentation, Signer’s time-sculptures frame episodes of the containment and release of energy − always with ingenuity, often with captivating, epigrammatic swiftness and irresistible humour. In Cap with Rocket (Mütze mit Rakete 1983), for example, a length of string connects a firework and a knitted hat that Signer has pulled over his head. The firework is ignited; it shoots into the air and whisks the hat away, revealing the artist’s face. In Stool − Kurhaus Weissbad (Hocker − Kurhaus Weissbad 1992) a small explosion triggers the catapulting of a four-legged stool out of a window; the stool sails through the air and crashes to earth. In Kamor (Kamor 1986) a gunpowder explosion at the summit of a small mountain in the Swiss canton of Appenzell produces a burst of flame and a plume of smoke and momentarily lends the summit the appearance of a live volcano. In Attaché Case (Aktenkoffer 1989/2001) a concrete-filled briefcase is taken on a short ride in a fast machine − a helicopter, to be precise. At a height of about a hundred metres it is dropped. Like a meteorite, it plummets into a grassy field and gouges a deep crater in the turf.

Simple! And in some ways, the step from sculpture to time-sculpture is indeed beautifully simple: elementary, to borrow a word the artist himself has often associated with his work. In the face of the striking immediacy and poetic plasticity of Signer’s pieces, critical commentaries can sometimes seem frankly redundant − like a dull-witted, pedantic glossing of a perfectly-timed, beautifully-judged joke. The critic is dogged by the suspicion that (to co-opt a phrase from Simon Critchley) a time-sculpture ‘explained’ might be a time-sculpture misunderstood. From a seemingly restricted palette of processes and materials, Signer generates a poetics whose tones range from the melancholy to the thrilling, from the charming to the violent, from the grave to the frankly, irresistibly silly, and many points north, south, east and west of these affective co-ordinates.

© Rachel Withers 2007, Excerpt from: Withers, Rachel, 'Collector’s Choice. Roman Signer (engl.). Volume 07', Cologne: Dumont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2007

Change is good, but never when your in it.

Circles, a new short film by Hillman Curtis.

Jesse Reno Process Video

Matthew Herbert - There's You and There's Me

I don't post music on Anteism very often but I could not help but share this gem. This album is not just music. It's more than the sum of the notes you can hear in the recording. Matthew Herbert's album "There's You and There's Me" is so powerful because of the amazing connections between the music, location of recordings and what's happening behind the sound curtain.

"Matthew Herbert's dazzling new album There's Me and There's You is the most seductive, sophisticated and subversive collection of protest songs ever recorded. Blending lush jazz instrumentation, soulful vocals, fascinating rhythms and a secret underground arsenal of outlandish samples, it marks Herbert's second collaboration with his big band. Effortlessly wrapping deluxe avant-jazz arrangements around polemical lyrics and artfully selected noises, the album's dominant theme is power and its abuses in the 21st century. The album's dense mix of audacious samples includes the sound of 70 condoms being scraped along the floor of the British Museum, a match being struck in the House of Parliament, one of 100 nails being hammered into a coffin, vocals recorded at a landfill and a McDonald's, and 100 credit cards being cut up, among other things. Recorded with a vast community of musicians and participants, There's Me and Then There's You has a declaration on the cover signed by all parties involved: "We, the undersigned, believe that musical can still be a political force of note and not just the soundtrack to over-consumption.

The overall theme of There's Me, and There's You is the use and abuse of power in the 21st century, whether that power resides in the church ("Pontificate"), the media ("The Story"), greed ("Rich Man's Prayer"), monarchy ("Regina") or the various power sources affecting concerns such as climate change and consumerism. But these individual critiques are slyly pitched to insinuate themselves imperceptibly through arrangements echoing musical theatre, cartoon music and brassy jazz, in contrast to the hectoring tone which turns so many away from the standard folk-protest mode of political music."

Chris Johanson Interview

I recently had the opportunity to check out a screening of the Beautiful Losers movie. It was amazing to see the artists behind the work that we've all seen and love. What was really impressed on me was the personalities, the honesty and life that each of these artists had/have to give. This is the reason why their art is so good, it's not because it's original or rebelious or whatever, it's because it's human and these artists know how to truly express themselves.

I've always enjoyed the artwork of Chris Johanson but after seeing the Beautiful Losers movie and seeing the artist himself I can appreciate his art much more. He puts a smile on my face.

Here's a perfect stereotypical "interview" with Chris Johanson

Beautiful Losers Movie

Beautiful Losers film trailer from beautifullosersfilm on Vimeo.

Robert Bateman - Not a Pretty Picture

I can't stand the not in my back yard attitude. Everyone consumes oil but no one wants the waste in their eyesight. I changed my mind when I realized that there has been a ban on oil tankers for the last 35 years why risk catastrophe now!

For over 35 years the coastal waters of BC have been protected from oil tanker traffic. This ban on tankers is now under threat. Plans to build pipelines and a supertanker port in Kitimat by Enbridge are moving forward with support from the BC and Canadian governments. But there is still time to save our coast.

Join the successive generations that have successfully kept oil tankers out of BC waters for over thirty years. The first step is signing the petition.