Your Daily Awesome

John Stezaker is fascinated by the power of images and questions the authority of pictures found in books, magazines, postcards and encyclopaedias by directly intervening into their ordinary status. Through the handcrafted act of splicing together, inverting, or simply adjusting an image Stezaker embarks upon ‘a process that cuts it off from its disappearance into the everyday world’.

The collaged works shown here, taken from his City, Mask and Reparation series, have a playful and dreamlike presence reminiscent of the uncanny quality of Surrealist works. Through processes of deconstruction and reassemblage, Stezaker offers a fragmented and mediated experience of the world that creates a strange and disjointed reality.

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(Yes, I know. I’ve posted things about either Miranda or the Blow on a seemingly bi-weekly basis ever since Your Daily Awesome launched. But they’re major talents, and a lot of this site’s readers [myself included] are fans. Even so, I’m thinking this might be overkill, but I’m posting it anyway. It’s a good interview.—Chas)

MIRANDA JULY: Another beautifully sad lyric on that record is the one that goes, “If something in the deli aisle makes you cry…”

KHAELA MARICICH: What’s funny is that I made that up in my head around you.

MJ: Really?

KM: Yeah, we were in the Whole Foods, when I was visiting you in Portland one time, and I was staring at the overwhelming mass of all the food, kind of personal but really so impersonal. I had that really overwhelmed feeling; just wanting someone to come up and see that, and see me, and see that they should walk me outside.

MJ: Right, but I guess I didn’t walk you outside, did I? That’s not the punch line: you were waiting and then I walked you out? You probably didn’t even tell me.

KM: I don’t think I would have taken the risk to expect that from you at that point. I think my eyes were a little watery, and I was like, “Do you ever want someone to walk you out the door? Just put their arm around you and walk you out?”

MJ: I was probably like, “Get it together, Khaela!”

KM: You were just like, “We need food.”

MJ: That’s so funny, because I’ve imagined those two women in the deli aisle. So just say the lyrics so we have it.

KM: [in a normal speaking voice] If there’s something in the deli aisle that makes you cry / You know I’ll put my arm around you and walk you outside / through the sliding doors / Why would I mind?

MJ: OK, but you sing it much less flip. I love the “why would I mind?” part. It implies that someone else is saying “Do you mind doing this for me? Is this OK?” That’s the part that breaks my heart, because it’s very female to feel like that’s too much to ask.

KM: Yeah, yeah, totally.

MJ: Even in your fantasies there’s an implicit apology. That’s the extra part that you probably don’t even think about, I’m guessing. I don’t, when I’m writing. When people ask me, “Is there a female point of view in your work?” I’m always like, I don’t know. I’m just me, and am I even human? But when I heard that line, I was like, Oh, no guy would have that fantasy of someone saying, “Why would I mind?”

KM: It seems like a lot to ask.

MJ: Yeah, it’s so much to ask! [Both laugh]

read the whole interview
photograph of Khaela by yours truly

A fascinating video portrait of a man who makes prosthetic eyeballs for a living.
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“The Ring” by Swedish collective Masquerade
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After beginning his working life as a printer’s apprentice, Louis Crucius (or Crusius) completed the necessary requirements to graduate as a pharmacist in 1882 and a doctor in 1890 in St Louis, Missouri. While he was studying he worked in a pharmacy and made humorous sketches that were placed in the window of the store. A collection of these drawings was published in 1893 (’Funny Bones’).

30 of the Crucius ‘dance of death’-inspired drawings were used to make 5 years worth of Antikamnia Chemical Company calendars - between 1897 and 1901. They had a fairly aggressive marketing campaign in which the calendars (aimed at the medical fraternity) as well as postcards and sample packs were distributed to doctors in the United States and overseas.

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I love photographs the way I love books—I love epics works and miniature odes, facts and fictions, classics and cutting edge stuff. But since I started studying photographs as a teenager, I have never been anything less than awed and moved by the work from Magnum, the agency made up of the “rock stars” of photojournalism. But in addition to what we think of when we consider classic photojournalism, Magnum has always kept it lively with photographers best known for nonfiction-based art photographers, like Alec Soth, Martin Parr, and Jim Goldberg. This year is Magnum’s 60th Birthday, and a terrific website has been created in commemoration: One photo has been selected to represent each year of the agency’s history. The cumulative effect is staggering.

1955, Dennis Stock—James Dean, New York

1962, Bruce Davidson—Reverend Martin Luther King at a press conference.

1977, Bruce Gilden—Coney Island

2005, Thomas Dworzak—Arson after looting in the Garden District, New Orleans

Kliph Nesteroff has a fascinating history of Al Hartley, the born-again Christian who first started trying to slip subtle Christian messages into Archie Comics in the ’60s, and was then later hired to create overtly evangelical books about the Riverdale gang.

Hartley’s morality is even funnier in Archie’s Date Book. It features a story about Archie’s problems in finding the right girl. The center of the comic features a two-page survey about what kind of a person you, the reader, would date, and what kind of a person you think Archie should date. At one point, Betty counters Reggie’s little black book of female phone numbers by holding up a bible, and of course saying, “I have a little black book of my own.” One of the final panels shows the Archie gang walking through a 42nd street style sleaze district, past movie theatres with marquees announcing X rated movies with titles like ‘Divorce, Any Style,’ ‘Crime Pays’ and my personal favorite, ‘Sex Sex.’ There is also a marquee for a film called ‘Sin City’ which is ironic not just because it became the name of a popular film, but it too, was from a comic book. Hartley editorializes with a caption that says, “Movies tell us it’s okay to do things that MESS US UP!” The next panel shows the Archie gang with shocked and disgusted looks on their faces as they watch TV. The panel reads, “TV makes vulgar jokes about things that should be PRIVATE and SACRED.” The very last panel is a giant Archie head with small imagery around him fucking up on dates with Betty. Betty says, “That’s why I like dating you Arch it’s always exciting but never X-RATED!”

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Working with discarded paper bags from takeout joints such as McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme, commercial gift bags and post office packages, Teruya creates delicately rendered shadowboxes in which the sculptural form cut out from the container is shaped by the container itself. Using photography as the starting point, Teruya photographs trees he encounters in his daily life and then painstakingly recreates the form of the individual trees as paper cutouts that are suspended inside the bags. Light filters down through the holes to illuminate the tiny tree within each bag’s miniature interior landscape in what the Teruya describes as his attempt to return a spent consumer product back to the forest.

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The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from.

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You love the paintings; now buy the action figures!

A rug shaped after the map of Iraq features soldiers advancing from many direction into Bagdad. Through newspapers and television, the image of Iraq is continuously depicted with graphics similar to board games and action figures, giving it a game-like dimension, which somehow shifts the character of the war. The rug, with cute little felt soldiers walking on a soft and warm surface, denounces this confusion, and the way in which the tragic reality of war is somehow diluted by using these images.

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The excellent Coudal Partners have come up with a great experiement that exploits the web in a great, hands-on, human way: the Swap Meat—part leap of faith, part art exchange, part black market.

Send us some of your stuff. Not stuff you made for clients or stuff you just have laying around. Send us some of the stuff you made for yourselves, that you’re selling or giving away. You’re going to have to trust us on this, but we’ll check out what you send and then send you back some stuff of approximately equal value. That might be stuff we received from someone else or some of our stuff, or some combination of the two.

The Four Things That Can Happen When You Send Us Something For Swapping

1. Nothing. If you send us something mass-produced or something that is generally available through mainstream retail outlets or that doesn’t fit in the general vibe of the Swap Meat, we’ll look at it, possibly enjoy it and maybe even write about it somewhere. But beyond that, nothing will happen.

2. You Get Swapped. We’ll match your item with someone else’s item and swap them. This is the most likely result and we hope you dig what you get back. That’s really what this whole thing is all about.

3. You Get Swapped & Featured. We’ll photograph and write a short profile about selected original, amazing, creative things and feature them on the Swapped Page including a link to where people can get more information or make a purchase. We’re featuring at least one new thing every weekday and if you subscribe to our blended RSS feed you’ll know when they’re posted.

4. You Get Swapped, Featured & Commissioned. When we receive an item that we totally love and that is, for one reason or another, not available for sale on the web, we may commission the object’s creator to produce a special, limited-edition to be sold through our Swapped Page.

Now get to swapping, or check out some of the selected items changing hands right now. (Or watch the project’s sweet video.)

Did anybody in New York catch Matthieu Laurette’s talk Monday night? A quick trip around the internet reveals him to be a fascinating Frenchman (even if his website is sort of a nightmare to traverse).

•In 1993, he established his artistic birth certificate by taking part in a TV game called Tournez Manège (The Dating Game) where the female presenter asked him who he was, to which he replied: ‘A multimedia artist.’

Says his Wiki:

•Since his first Apparition on Tournez Manége, Laurette has been developing an ongoing series of what he calls ‘Apparitions’ on TV and in the media. (In French the word Apparition means both ‘apparition’ and ‘appearance’). Among other shows he has appeared in La Grande famille, Canal +, TV (France), Je passe à la télé (France), Journal de 13h et Journal de 20h (France).

Laurette’s Apparition: The Today Show, NBC, 31 December 2004, (Guy Debord Is So Cool!) (2004) renegotiates the critique of mass media: amongst love message banners and goofy signs being held up by the audience of the outdoor-broadcast of the NBC infotainment show on Rockefeller Plaza in New York, Laurette held a pink cardboard sign stating “GUY DEBORD IS SO COOL!”

•Laurette’s Produits remboursés/Money-back Products (1993-2001) was his method of shopping and being fully refunded based on the basic marketing system of the major food and commodities corporations. He fed and cleaned himself for nothing by almost only ever buying products with “Satisfied or your money back” or “Money back on first purchase” offers. In 2001 at the 49th Venice Biennale, he presented Moneyback Life! a large retrospective installation combining enlargements of press cuttings, a truck with an integrated TV wall showing TV clips of his Apparitions/Appearances and a life size wax figure of himself pushing a shopping cart full of Moneyback products.

•Citizenship Project (Wanted: Financial Support to Acquire Citizenships) are a series of projects where Laurette attempts to acquire as many nationalities as possible.

Check out Laurette’s MySpace or download a free 58-page catalogue of his projects.

When the levees broke, nothing was the same for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is about escaping and surviving Hurricane Katrina–and what happens next in the lives of a cross-section of Crescent City residents. Told in webcomic form, A.D. is free and presented by SMITH Magazine.

A.D. tells the story of Katrina and its aftermath from the perspective of real people still dealing with the storm each and every day. A two-part prologue sets the scene and shows the storm, almost like a silent movie. In chapter one, we meet the people whose lives we’ll be following over the course of one year, with audio and video augmenting the comic itself on our active blog. A.D. is a nonfiction graphic novel, a new approach to storytelling, and a multifaceted peek into the personal tales emerging from the storm of the century.

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
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