‘Forgotten Man’ Painting Shows President Obama Trampling Constitution
The Forgotten Man by Jon McNaughton
Peter M. Vilo reports on the currently raging controversy for CBS Las Vegas:
In front of the White House a man is sitting on a park bench in the throes of depression. He is surrounded by all 43 presidents. In the forefront, purposefully ignoring the depressed man is President Obama, whose right foot is stepping on the Constitution. James Madison is next to Obama, pleading with him to stop.
This tableau is called “The Forgotten Man”, a painting by Jon McNaughton, an artist who is known for his politically-charged work.
The painting, which uses objects such as discarded dollar bills as symbols and scraps of paper with individual constitutional amendments scrawled onto them, has been making the rounds across the Internet.
The painting was initially released in 2010 and has resurfaced, causing a stir when it appeared for a caption contest on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s blog.
The responses have ranged…
Crafting With Human Hair
Victorian Hair Wreath
During the 19th century it was fashionable to incorporate human hair into brooches, watch chains, wreaths, and other objects that could be worn or displayed. Victorian Gothic explores the lost art of sentimental hairwork:
Mrs. Hamlin of Omaha, Nebraska left a rather curious heirloom to her descendants—an intricately woven bouquet composed entirely of human hair. Buried deep inside, each of its flowers is numbered with a tiny label corresponding one of fifteen names written on a separate index card; those of herself and her loved ones. More than a century ago, each of these people offered up their locks of brown or gray—literally, pieces of themselves—to provide the material for what would become a lasting symbol family unity.
The weaver need not have been the eccentric that one might suppose. On the contrary, she was likely to have been a conventional middle class lady going about her fancywork. She may have included a…
The Sinister Vision Of Street View
9eyes is one of the best collections of Google Street View screenshots, providing a haunting glimpse of the world we live in, culled from all seven continents and presented without context. Are all of these real? Some of the strangest entries can be confirmed as legitimate.
By Popular Demand: The Cure For What Ails You
A little over a decade ago, disinformation published its first book, the now out of print anthology You Are Being Lied To (superseded by You Are STILL Being Lied To). We didn’t really know much about publishing books at the time, so when the book industry’s biggest annual trade show in Chicago came around, we needed help to stand out from the crowd. Enter Thomas Negovan, who was, and is our standard bearer in Chicago. Proprietor of the amazing art gallery Century Guild, Tom “found the others” for us.
A Renaissance man, Tom is also an accomplished musician who has done something truly unusual and, to my mind so compelling, that if you are anywhere near Los Angeles this week, you should go to the most unique of record release parties. I asked Tom to explain for disinformation:
It’s Sunday night, I’m up in Topanga in my friend Ysanne’s cabin, and as I experience no internet, no cell phone, and a…
‘Union of Opposites’ Ritual Occult Performance
Brian Butler featured in the disinformation TV series and is Kenneth Anger’s main collaborator. His latest work, ‘Union of Opposites,’ is an experiment in ritual magick, combining the use of sound and light with the intent of creating a collective out-of-body experience. It will debut at Art Los Angeles Contemporary on Saturday, January 21, 2012. Brian told disinformation:
Aleister Crowley defines magick as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” This statement provides the magickal formula in a very simple yet powerful way.
Union of Opposites is a public ritual performance that explores how the principals of magick operate in the astral and physical worlds. It is a live experiment with the participation of an audience. I have designed this working to activate the chakras in a specific order that is very unconventional. Given the advancements in science and technology since Crowley’s lifetime the rituals must be constantly revised in order…
Seeing And Hearing In The Future
In an interview with the Believer, key performance artist and electronic musician Laurie Anderson traverses a lot of ground. But one intriguing portion concerns her thoughts on sensory enhancement as the big advancement to come. If we can view, hear, and touch better and more intensely, will we be more alive?
Five thousand years from now — let’s say we didn’t find the God particle. We’re still looking. I think we probably won’t be making things of the nature that we are now. I think we’ll just be trying to appreciate things more. Maybe we’ll design better ears. I mean, our hearing’s crappy. We’ll have huge ears and we’ll be able to tune in to Mars, or we’ll have a hundred lenses through which we can look onto the surface of Mars with our so-called “bare eyes,” or look through our hands. We’ll be able to be in the present more effectively.
Walter Potter’s Taxidermy Wants to Swallow Your Soul
Walter Potter’s collection of anthropomorphic taxidermy included cigar-smoking squirrels, athletic toads, and a kittens’ tea party. Victorian Gothic writes:
While the preservation of hunting trophies may be the best-known use of the taxidermist’s art, fans of Walter Potter’s anthropomorphic tableaux can attest to the fact that it has its other, more silly uses. Potter (1835-1918) was a self-taught taxidermist who grew up in the rural community of Bramber, Sussex, at a time when stuffing dead animals was considered to be a suitable hobby for young boys. For technical assistance, he would have had any number of popular manuals at his disposal. For inspiration, he had his younger sister’s illustrated nursery rhyme books and the Great Exhibition of 1851, where anthropomorphic taxidermy was first displayed to the British public.
His first major contribution was an elaborate diorama depicting the death and burial of Cock Robin, which he began at age 19 and took seven years to…
Man Jailed For Creating Mutant Taxidermy
Guilty of imagining a vivid, strange world that doesn’t exist, and trying to bring it into creation. The Daily Mail writes:
Like a modern day Dr Frankenstein, Enrique Gomez De Molina creates hauntingly stunning hybrid sculptures made from the stuffed parts of dead animals. But it…could land the Miami artist in jail for up to five years and see him forking out $250,000 in fines.
He pleaded guilty to illegally importing parts from endangered species to make his beloved mythical creatures. He smuggled in the parts, skins and remains, from whole cobras, pangolins, hornbills, and the skulls of babirusa and orangutans from areas all over the world including Bali, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and China.
Giant Emocon Reflects The Mood Of The City
Installed in Lindau Island, Germany, the Feel-o-meter sums up the populace’s collective consciousness. Pass by with a frown, and you could slightly dampen its smile. (You wouldn’t want to do that, would you?) Via Information Aesthetics:
Fuehlometer (Feel-o-meter) by Richard Wilhelmer, Julius von Bismarck, and Benjamin Maus is a light installation consisting of a giant smiley face that reflects the average mood of the people living in the city. The average emotional value is calculated through the computational analysis of the faces of people passing a camera located in a specific part of the city.
Extreme Futurist Festival 2011
Picture an event where the bridge between the counterculture and academia is finally crossed. From live tech demonstrations to futuristic presentations to provocative performance art to live music we will take you off the grid as we explore a new kaleidoscopic wonderland. If the original Burning Man was to meet the Singularity Summit, you would have Extreme Futurist Fest 2011.
The dance for the realization of the future begins in the corridors of art, literature, and culture. Only by connecting together the greatest visionary minds with the most innovative and rule-breaking forms of artistic expression and cultural mind-melding can we unlock the full potential of the Future and bring it into the Present. We offer you the bold new interdisciplinary movement of the 21st Century. A place where the right brain and left brain merge into a new “Undivided Mind”.
The future is all around us today. The explosion of the Internet…
Photographs Of Black Sites
Via We Me Make Money Not Art, a conversation with artist Trevor Paglen, who acts as a modern-day discoverer, travelling the globe attempting to photograph the last “uncharted territory” — classified locations such as the CIA’s rendition sites:
For his Limit Telephotography series, Paglen used high powered telescopes to picture the “black” sites, a series of secret locations operated by the CIA. Often outside of U.S. territory and legal jurisdiction, these locations do not officially exist, they range from American torture camps in Afghanistan to front companies running airlines whose purpose is to covertly move suspects around.
Paradoxically Paglen’s images deepen the secrecy of their subject rather than uncover it. Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth. Paglen’s subjects are much closer but also even more difficult to photograph. To physical distance, one has indeed to add the…
Crazy Clown Time with David Lynch
David Lynch, the surrealist director behind such films as Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive, is branching out. His new solo album is entitled “Crazy Clown Time.”
Occupy Wall Street As Pong
From MK12, the opening animation for a special Occupy Wall Street screening, curated by Zero Film Festival in NYC. Here’s how to win at life:
Cave Art More Realist Than Abstract
Image of a horse from the Lascaux caves.
If you thought that those ancient cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere were pretty abstract, think again. AP via Fox News reports that DNA studies suggest the cave painters were actually painting what they saw:
Cave painters during the Ice Age were more like da Vinci than Dali, sketching realistic depictions of horses they saw rather than dreaming them up, a study of ancient DNA finds.
It’s not just a matter of aesthetics: Paintings based on real life can give first-hand glimpses into the environment of tens of thousands of years ago. But scientists have wondered how much imagination went into animal drawings etched in caves around Europe.
The latest analysis published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focused on horses since they appeared most frequently on rock walls. The famed Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France and the…
Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
I’ve always enjoyed the story of Toynbee Tiles and now there is a documentary:
BOMB and Transgressive Art
Born in the middle of nowhere Raymond Salvatore Harmon has wandered the earth, building things out of nothing, constructing realities from vague indifference and cultivating a prolonged distaste for both academia and any kind of manual labor.
RSH: “At all levels, ultimately graffiti is an act of cultural insurgency. It is a rebellion; against the norm, against society at large, against corporations, against the city or “government.” Graffiti is the act of changing the visual environment in the public space. It doesn’t matter if its a quickly scrawled tag or a well developed painting, it shouldn’t be there and it is.”
James Curcio: To begin with, I’d like to hear what you think the function of graffiti art is. Maybe it has a purpose, maybe it doesn’t, but even if you don’t intend a purpose, a social action like that has a reaction, it serves a function. They don’t necessarily all need to have the…
Huge Lego Man Washes Up On Florida Beach
Wired writes that for the third time in recent years, a gigantic Lego figure has washed ashore on a coastline in the Northern Hemisphere. Artist is unknown. Below, video of a similar occurrence in Holland. Damn you, Lego man, for making me confront my own emptiness!
A larger-than-life Lego man bearing the cryptic phrase “no real than you are” has washed ashore on the Florida coast. Beachcombers in Siesta Key found the roughly 8-foot-tall Lego man just before dawn Tuesday. The figure had “Ego Leonard” and the number 8 on its back.
In 2007, an almost-identical creation was found in the Netherlands. Another turned up in England the next year.
How To Start A Dance Kult
Let’s start with what God is: the Father, Son & Holy Spirit.
The confusion about the nature of God starts with the idea God is separate from Existence. Also, there seems to be a tendency to treat the Father as God itself and the Son & Holy Spirit as a part of, but not equal to the Father. From these simple misunderstandings comes the logical paradoxes we’re all familiar with.
So here’s where we begin to clear things up. God is the single thing, but there are three aspects that make up the totality of God. Here’s the analogy: we take a piece of cheese. The cheese is one thing; however, there are aspects to the cheese that make up the whole thing: we have the shape, color & taste of the cheese. So where does the cheese end and its aspects begin? Well obviously that’s an impossible question.
So now the issue…
