Nick Turpin spends his winter evenings “photographing commuters going home in the dark and wet.” 

Klaus Kemp, diatomist, “spent 8 years researching glue to find the perfect formula.”

Filmed by Matthew Killip. 

Theodore Dalrymple on language and “austerity”: 

This is not a question of whether the economic policy followed by the government is the right one or not: perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t. It is a question of the honest use of words. One would not say of a man who passed from smoking sixty cigarettes a day to fifty that he had given up smoking, or that he had exercised great self-denial. And one would not, or rather should not, say of an organisation that had balanced its budget once in fifty years (the British government) that it was practicing austerity merely because it had to borrow a slightly lower percentage of what it spent than it did the year before. This is to deprive words of their meaning… If reducing the rate at which you overspend and accumulate debt is called austerity, no one will dare go any further in that direction, though it were the right direction in which to go.

But all that “austerity” and all those “violent” “spending cuts” are, as Julia M notes, making our artists angry: 

Now a new group of British artists and musicians are hoping to use art, song, theatre and words, as well as social media, to combat the coalition’s austerity agenda.

No, you mustn’t. Remember how scared we were the last time our artists shook their fists at us. One of the protesting artists, the Occupier and “urban poet” Rob Montgomery, tells us, “My art is about what capitalism does to your heart, and the inner child in you.” His deep, visionary radicalism can be savoured here. He’s teaching us, you see. Because he knows so much.

And Jennifer Kabbany on yet another fake “hate crime” and its vain fabricator: 

I was trying to make a point… now everyone has ideas on what type of person I am. I am none of these things… I am myself, I am caring and kind.

One to add to the rapidly growing list of kind, caring psychodramas. 

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

Or, They’re Teaching You. Can’t You Tell?

Yes, it’s once again time to wade through the aesthetic slaughterhouse that is performance art. This time, I’m treating you to edited highlights of a ninety-minute “durational performance” by Katy Albert and Sophia Hamilton, aka Mothergirl. This Chicago duo tells us that their work “exhibits a strategically refracted or misrepresented view of current political and philosophical discourse, creating a space where viewers are challenged to think critically about their own relationships with feminism, consumerism, and representational visuality.” But of course. Given their talent, or at least their self-regard, how could it not?

In the video below, filmed in 2013 near an onramp in the city of Chicago and titled Don’t Sleep, There’s a War Going On, we see the ladies beating themselves around the head and face with large feather pillows. Thereby enlightening passers-by, obviously. The duo describes the piece as “a physical act of frustration – an ambiguous response to the implicit guilt of inaction and the weight of overwhelming knowledge.” If the point of the performance somehow escapes you, due to your philistine tendencies, the ladies provide clues to its deep meaning, and by extension their own brilliance: “The lack of clarity serves two purposes: to show the expansiveness of war and to allow [the] audience to access the image first and the meaning second.”

Now cower in the shadow of their artistic enormity: 

Because I know you love it, here’s more “guerrilla art” on a bridge. Or more specifically, an “infiltration in public space.” This time the venue is Pier 66 at the 2011 Fountain New York Art Fair, where Canadian performance artist Martine Viale thrills and captivates passers-by, armed only with a carrier bag of bobbins and a head wrapped in yarn. The powerful climax is rather special.

A triumph, I think you’ll agree.

Ms Viale regards her body as “a place of research” and her “artistic practice” is, needless to say, terribly intellectual, indeed profound, focussing as it does “on ‘process-action’ and the corporeality of space and time that allow for simultaneous multi-dimensional developments.”

Ms Viale’s other, no less mighty works include Intra Muros 1, highlights of which can be seen here, Elongation, a “physically demanding” work that involved stepping from one bowl of blue paint to the next, and which, for one reviewer, “evoked a metaphysical cloud of unknowing,” and Ma Interval (Tel Aviv), in which our fearlessly transgressive artist wrapped wool around some bus station benches and then stood motionless for over an hour, presumably waiting for applause and recognition of her talent.

Previously on a bridge.