BigShinyThing

On February 8th, the US state of Nebraska declared that execution by electric chair amounted to an unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. The US state was the only one still using electrocution as its sole method of execution and the move came after a condemned man, Raymond Mata, appealed against his sentence. In its nine-decade history, this particular chair had been used 15 times.

Little by little, America is beginning to balk at capital punishment: the method rather the madness of it. The most popular method — lethal injection — is currently being investigated by the Supreme Court and Nebraska may struggle to find a replacement way of meting out ‘justice’.

Source: The Economist.

Singer songwriter and producer who famously collaborated with Nancy Sinatra dies aged 78. According to the BBC report, on being diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2005, Hazlewood gave away his gold and platinum discs to friends outside the music industry and started worked on his final album, Cake Or Death.

A five-time Academy Award nominee for best director, most recently for 2001’s Gosford Park, Altman finally won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2006.

“No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have,” Altman said while accepting the award. “I’m very fortunate in my career. I’ve never had to direct a film I didn’t choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition.”

Obituary at Seattle Pi.

Star of the seminal documentary about the New York ballroom scene Paris is Burning and legendary Vogue-er, Willi Ninja also appeared in Malcolm McLaren’s pre-Madonna attempt at popularising the scene, Deep in Vogue. Only the other day, thanks to YouTube, we found a lot of proof that Vogue-ing wasn’t dead (see below). Now sadly one of its grande dames is.

Clearly a lurid palette helps you live longer. The artist adored by 1970s households and kitsch revivalists died on 26th August. In his prime, the painter of that curiously green Chinese Girl was the wealthiest artist in the world after Picasso — despite being at the opposite end of the market.

His garish colours matched exactly the fixtures and fittings of the average 1970s household (avocado bath tubs anyone?) but Tretchikoff defended his somewhat startling representations of women saying,

If I wanted to convey ideas through my paintings, why should I obscure the subject?

During the revival in interest in his work in the 1990s, Tretchikoff maintained his poise as a serious painter and refused to allow one of his paintings to adorn the cover of a book on kitsch. His work, he maintained, was symbolic realism. His adopted homeland of South Africa begged to differ. The National Gallery in Cape Town has never deigned to purchase an original Tretchikoff on the grounds that “he is not really regarded as a South African artist”.

It’s not been a good summer for psychedelia. Arthur Lee, frontman of legendary rock group Love, and genuine BigShinyThing died of leukaemia on Friday.

The BBC reports that Syd died from complications arising from diabetes. Here’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ — remember him this way.

CNN took an easy pot shot at Wikipedia this week for its ahem ‘live editing’ (otherwise known as breaking news) on the death of Enron executive Kenneth Lay. CNN reports smugly how:

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, added news of Lay’s death to his online biography shortly after news outlets began reporting it at around 10 a.m. ET (2.p.m GMT).

At 10:06 a.m. Wikipedia’s entry for Lay said he died “of an apparent suicide.”

At 10:08 it said he died at his Aspen home “of an apparent heart attack or suicide.”

Within the same minute, it said the cause of death was “yet to be determined.”

At 10:09 a.m. it said “no further details have been officially released” about the death.

Two minutes later, it said: “The guilt of ruining so many lives finaly (sic) led him to his suicide.”

At 10:12 a.m. this was replaced by: “According to Lay’s pastor the cause was a ‘massive coronary’ heart attack.”

By 10:39 a.m. Lay’s entry said: “Speculation as to the cause of the heart attack lead many people to believe it was due to the amount of stress put on him by the Enron trial.” This statement was later dropped.

By early Wednesday afternoon, the entry said Lay was pronounced dead at Aspen Valley Hospital, citing the Pitkin, Colorado, sheriff’s department. It said he apparently died of a massive heart attack, citing KHOU-TV in Houston.

CNN goes on to note that staff at Wikipedia ‘did not immediately return calls’. But they’re not the reporters are they?

Ivor Cutler wrote surreal songs and poetry and continued to perform live until 2004. He also wrote books, did illustrations and made radio series. He appeared regularly on John Peel’s radio shows and The Beatles gave him a role in the film Magical Mystery Tour. Cutler’s 1967 album Ludo, produced by George Martin, was re-released in 1997 by Alan McGee’s label, Creation.

According to the BBC obituary, Cutler attributed much of his weirdness to the displacement he felt when his younger brother was born.

“Without that I would not have been so screwed up as I am, and therefore not as creative,” he said.

“Without a kid brother I would have been quite dull.”

Much of Cutlet’s work, including audio files, are available online at his tribute page.

It features both Cash and his wife very shortly before both of them died. The song is from Cash’s last album of cover versions which also features his extraordinary version of ‘Personal Jesus’.

Isn’t it great when you see something on TV one night and the next day you can just find it on the web, at YouTube?

The campaign is due to be broadcast in Belgium next week. It opens with the Smurfs dancing, hand in hand, around a campfire and singing the Smurf song. Bluebirds flutter past and rabbits gambol around the familiar village of mushroom shaped houses until, without warning, bombs begin to rain down. The smurfs scatter and run in vain from the onslaught. The final scene shows a scorched and tattered Baby Smurf sobbing, surrounded by prone Smurfs. The endline reads, “Don’t let war affect the lives of children.” The ad is part of a fundraising drive to raise £70,000 for the rehabilitation of former child soldiers in Burundi.

Philipppe Henon, a spokesman for Unicef Belgium, said his agency had set out to shock, after concluding that viewers had become immured to traditional warzone images. “It’s controversial,” he said. “We have never done something like this before, but we’re learned over the years that the reaction to the more normal type of campaign is very limited.”

Unicef’s agency, Publicis, decided the best way to convey the impact of war on children was to tap into the earliest, happiest memories of Belgian television viewers. They chose the Smurfs, who first appeared in a Belgian comic in 1958. The animation was approved by the family of the Smurf’s late creator, “Peyo”.

Julie Lamoureux, account director at Publicis for the campaign, said the agency’s original plans were toned down.

We wanted something that was real war - Smurfs losing arms, or Smurfs losing a head - but they said no.

Footage of the ad has already appeared online.

So says legendary photographer Stanley Forman this week, in an indictment of the power of television as a medium. Forman is (in)famous for taking the 1975 photograph of 19 year old Diana Bryant and her two year old god-daughter Tiare Jones falling from a broken fire escape during an apartment fire in Boston, Massachusetts. Diana did not survive the fall and, decades before 9/11, Forman’s photograph bought into question the rights of victims and the voyeuristic nature of photography.

He was quoted in an interview from the BBC as the World Press Photo foundation celebrates the 50th anniversary of its annual photographic competition.

Joslin constructs the sculptures out of

antique ceremonial collars, antlers, bone, brass, velvet, antique hardware, glass eyes, universal joints, springs, brass standoffs, casters, sculpted/painted leather, mink collar, saxophone keys, antique shoehorn, beads, lamp fittings, glove leather, music wire, cast pewter feet… I find things anywhere that I find myself… in obscure junk shops, flea markets, attics, taxidermy supply houses, speciality hardware distributor … or walking through the woods.

The creatures range in height from 1 inch to nearly 6 feet tall.

Taxidermy and the use of deceased animals in art seem to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance - one that has very little to do with either Damien Hirst or moth-eaten ancestral homes (thank god). Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market features the work of taxidermist Emma Hawkins whilst BST has previously written about the art of Nathalie Edenmont and Pinar Yolacan. Perhaps it is a reaction both to the interiors minimalism of the 90s and a celebration of skill and intricacy in art. Maybe we’ve just got our curiosity back.

There are more of Joslin’s recent sculptures on her homepage. The ‘Lula’ sculpture pictured is reproduced here by kind permission of the artist.

Thompson committed suicide in February of this year.

Photo courtesy of BBC Online.

The BBC reports this week that a man has died after playing a computer game for hours at a time in South Korea. Shock horror stories about online gaming are nothing new, the latest big one being the guy in Shanghai who got stabbed in a dispute over a virtual gaming sword. Some people take their alternative lives in MMORPGs very seriously indeed.

The real shock in this article for me came right at the end: 30% of the South Korean population are registered for online gaming.

BST has written about South Korea before - see previous posts: Cunnilingus in North Koreaand Ohmynews.com. As the most wired nation on earth, South Korea has become something of a nursery for what all our futures may look like.

The picture shows New York spray can memorial by Antonio ‘Chico’ Garcia, located on Bruckner Boulevard, off Brook Avenue, Mott Haven, Bronx. This was Chico’s first memorial portrait, for a high school friend called Ed. Ed was shot down in a hail of bullets in a drive by shooting near this empty lot. The Lower East Side mural has since been defaced by rival dealers.

This is just one of 100 plus such murals documented by Martha Cooper and Joseph Sciorra in their recent book, R.I.P.: New York Spraycan Memorials. The murals memorialise all manner of death in the mean streets of New York: drugs, shooting, wars, asthma deaths, traffic accidents and AIDS.

In the introduction, Sciorra writes:

The memorial wall transforms personal grief into shared public sentiment by serving as a vehicle for community affiliation and potential empowerment. Covering the expenses for materials and the artist’s labor is often a collective endeavor, with neighborhood residents making contributions in memory of one of their own. The murals create new public spaces for community ceremony. Life is celebrated at the walls with parties marking anniversaries and birthdays. These centers of congregation become rallying points of candlelight processions and demonstrations held by community people who march through the streets in opposition to violence, drugs or police brutality.

These neighborhood billboards are used to elicit critical examination of the root causes and solutions to the daily onslaught against inner-city youth. The Crown Heights Youth Collective in Brooklyn sponsors memorials in an aggressive campaign to cultivate alternatives to violence among the neighborhood’s Caribbean and African American kids.

The images in this book represent only a fraction of those we documented; they are a small part of the two thousand plus killing that occur each year in the city. Turn the page and witness a generation of sons and daughters — now gone.

Frances Glessner Lee was a wealthy grandmother with a passion for forensic science. She founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed captain in the New Hampshire Police. In the 1940s and 1950s she built dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases in order to train detectives to assess visual evidence. Lee called these tools the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a well-known police saying: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”

The models are still used in forensic training to this day and a book featuring photographs of the 18 dioramas was published last year. The dustsheet reads:

Corinne May Botz’s lush color photographs lure viewers into every crevice of Lee’s models, breathing life into the deadly miniatures, exposing the dark side of the domestic realm, and unveiling tales of prostitution, alcoholism, and adultery.

James Zwakman’s backyards also tell a story but one that is created in the mind of the viewer. His photographs of the models are huge — 220 x 146cm — forcing the viewer to appreciate the intricacy of the models. Zwakman has provided doormats, gravel, and in one case a clothes-drying apparatus with miniature white sheets and t-shirts. This intention is made clear in the title of the show: Fake but Accurate.

Just as Lee’s miniatures train the police to study the minutiae of crime scenes, Zwakman’s photographs bring a magnifying glass to the mundanity of the ‘burbs.

‘Zombie Dogs!’ screams the New York Post in typically hysterical fashion (free subscription required). However, the headlines mask what is a hugely exciting advance in medical science.

Scientists at Pittsburgh’s Safar Center for Resuscitation Research succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death. They developed a technique in which the subject’s veins are drained of blood and filled with ice-cold salt solution. The animals are considered to be clinically dead as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or blood activity. Three hours later, their blood is replaced and they are brought back to life with an electric shock (maybe the NYP has a point). Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, say the Safar Center.

The use for humans would not be to create an army of zombies, but to put subjects in this suspended state for long enough to perform life saving surgery. A few hours would be enough to save the lives of battlefield casualities and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss. According to one doctor involved in the trial, “The results are stunning. I think in 10 years we will be able to prevent death in a certain segment of those using this technology.”

The news makes all those cryogenically frozen folk - like Walt Disney (maybe)- look less silly after all.

Unlike a lot of people these days, she despatches the mice, cats and rabbits herself. Dismembered mice, chickens and cats form the centrepiece of her photographic art.

The furore that surrounds her art is already threatening to overshadow it. In 2003 a group of four masked members of the Swedish Nazi Party came into a gallery wielding baseball bats and destroyed four artworks. Andrew Butler — a PETA member — stood and slept in front of the same gallery for 122 consecutive hours, holding a sign that read ‘Cruelty is not art’. Colleen O’Brien, manager of communications at PETA headquarters in Norfolk, VA, believes that “the only place her work should bthe only place her work should be on display is in a police evidence room. Calling it art is appalling.” It certainly stirs debate. Edenmontʹs name gets some 7,000 hits on Google, mainly sites discussing the ethics of her work.

Thankfully, this unholy alliance of Nazis and animal rights protestors has not shaken the art world: Edenmont recently made the cover of Beaux Arts magazine. Critic Charlie Finch says, “Yes, these images are powerful, even beautiful, but it strikes me as a fascist beauty.”

Edenmount was recently reported to Swedish authorities by the National Veterinary Association for not having a vet present when she kills the animals. Ironically, she had just received a $12,000 arts grant from the Swedish government.

Pictured: Star, 2002.
See also: Pinar Yolacan, aka the ‘tripe artist’.