I never imagined ground gristle and nitrites piped into intestinal casing could so felicitously embody the Plutonic ideal, and yet there it is. Formally, these are gorgeous. Unfortch, if formalism cuts it for you, then you’re either a sociopath or Clem Greenburg reanimated. Probably both.

I don’t even need to actually articulate any semantic arguments because it’s already conveniently storyboarded as part of their brand campaign:

Commercial art is really hard because if it’s what you love to do, you can easily become supersaturated with symbols, images, pop narratives because that is your medium. Suddenly, your brain is a card catalog full of signs divorced from their signified. They’re pragmatic, a language you need to speak in to effectively communicate the message of your client’s product. What they are not, however, is human. These orphaned signs lack history, nuance, and complexity, but sometimes designers seem to forget that the audience translating them do not.

Mehndi is an art practiced, transmitted, and mastered almost entirely by women. It’s a tradition that mostly will use the female body as its canvas, rather than the male. In Western culture, it’s generally understood as an Indian/Arabic bridal custom. It’s a practice that is heavily steeped in femininity, family, and community; in rural Rajasthan, there is a bonding ritual beginning in the 8th month of pregnancy and past birth in which family and friends will form a system of support, both emotionally and in care giving, organized around the application of mehndi to a new mother.

It’d probably be a small hassle to find a more puissant icon of womanhood in like, all of human history, so it makes perfect sense then to print it on the casing of a sausage–factory farmed meat, natch.

Seriously, guys. A sausage. Mendhi-printed meat. Like their bridal counterparts, the deeper the design’s shade, the surer you may be that this banger will love your body (n uncooked one, for example, would not love you very much at all).  Also worth a chuckle: these sausages are marketed in Britain, produced now by Mr. Singh’s grandson, working from the original family recipe developed by the original Mr. Singh back in 1940’s India. ( India gained their independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Accounts seem to suggest one might not have called it a peaceable kingdom.)

It’s not offensive, just kind of astonishingly duh.

I’ve been inspired to change the face of academia and culture forevermore, so like, alert the media. I hereto declare a new job market for semiotic nerds, since none actually exist: every graphic design firm needs a dramaturge. Tell the industry they can pay me 120/hr to stand behind their desk and say, “Why is everything you make vaguely imperialist, weirdly misogynist, and explicitly appropriative? NEXT.”  I might also follow that up with, “I know you’re super busy channeling the Sartorialist and getting a hard-on for kerning, but when normal people eat, they don’t care to risk confusing the main course with the tablecloth. A sausage has dignity, you know. This shit wouldn’t even fly with New Money.”

For clarity on the relationship between sexual imagery, meat, and violence in consumer culture, see the work of Carol J. Adams.

(via leah)

And if you hadn’t heard, the impossible project has begun.  Digital will never touch you in the way you want it to.

Related: working on acquiring an old TLR, a rare and specific model I’ve been after for a long time.  Fuck you, ebay.

Over at the Stairwell Gallery, there is a photo show called On the Grid by some friends of mine, Adam Ryder and Brian Rosa, on view until February 5th.

The show is really exceptional.  Brian and Adam each have very beautiful ways of seeing, revealing the ordinary beauty of isolated landscapes which exist in the spaces between civic life, following the high-tension power grids which connect one city to another.  It’s a quiet, sort of tamed wilderness that you may or may not notice in its presence, subtle and maybe seemingly mundane, but translated here in a way that I greatly admire.

I was thinking about it in contrast to the ways I love toy cameras, instant photography, plastic bodies and lenses, disposable cameras, etc.  I love them for their limitations, which are namely imprecision, unpredictability, and the loss of control.  It’s frustrating and disappointing to want to hold onto an image you see with your own eyes, usually to find that your camera sees something dramatically less magical than you do.  I like to learn that tough little lesson of attachment over and over again, but when the limitations of the medium finally work in your favor every now and again, the dreamy, accidental energy of the moment is special and unmeditated.

With the stillness of landscapes like On the Grid, however, toy cameras almost never do.  The clarity of vision and patience you feel in these photos are a whole other world, all executed here in exactly the right way.  It’s really worth checking out.

The Stairwell Gallery is located at 504 Broadway, in Providence.  See the project online here.

After revising a review I did of Elena Dorfman’s photography exhibit Still Lovers, I was thinking again about Cindy Sherman, whom I adore and have written extensively on.  Much of the work over her career has employed various mannequins and disemboweled dollies as subjects, which, as you might have guessed, is basically my ideal aesthetic.

DV Blog has a link to one of her first Super 8 shorts, Doll Clothes, filmed in 1975.  It’s awesome.

In a recent Nerve interview, Stefan talks about why using sex in design is a super corny move:

Whenever we have anything sexual it’s done more in a jokey manner than in a sexy manner. Sex within graphic design is such a cliché that it’s difficult to use it, at least for this studio. We’ve had many music clients that pushed us to use sex on the album cover, but I always got around it, because, I don’t know, I always felt it was so lame. Steven Tyler had an idea to show a female astronaut who was trying to lick ice cream, but couldn’t because the helmet was in the way. And I refused to visualize that.

See also: why Aerosmith, Tom Ford are irrelevant and embarrassing.
See also: why Stefan Sagmeister is king: How Good Is Good? ]]> http://mattababy.com/archives/103/feed 0 http://mattababy.com/archives/106 http://mattababy.com/archives/106#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:38:17 +0000 Lilah http://mattababy.uber.com/blogs/Bodes_Out_of_Bounds.html I don’t buy fashion magazines. Ever. Somehow, I was signed up for a free year-long subscription to Nylon Magazine against my will, and it only served to remind me once again how cheap, exploitative, and useless they really are.

When Conde Naste has to make a big, self-congratulatory goddamn deal out of actually daring to include black models on the typically ubiquitously white pages of Vogue, can anyone really take fashion rags seriously anymore? Even an attempt to rationalize their value as art and inspiration is disappointing; when art is so doggedly committed to defining such a singular aesthetic with this almost eugenic enthusiasm, it soars long past engaging into flat out irrelevant—how long can you listen to something that isn’t meant for you?

Fellow Uber blogger Eddie posted a link to photographer Erwin Olaf, pointing specifically to a series called Mature. It’s totally incredible, rewriting classic cheesecake pinup poses using women whose bodies fall far outside of what Anna Winteur might dictate to be worthy of being seen. Yet, each picture is stunning and playful and sexy, way more successfully than any of the source material it’s recalling—the element of surprise, of defiance and vitality, make these legitimately interesting studies in beauty.

Anyway, here are some contemporary lady artists I have come across lately, and believe in thoroughly.

Rosalia Banet:

Carmen Lomas Garza:

Minchi:

Dhruvi Acharya:

Yvonne Todd:

I can basically only read these as a series of Shining-style domestic terror rationalizations, which probably says more about my own psyche than I’d care to examine, but I’m always psyched on art that conflates language and poetry with visual mediums. Worcesters might remember the best exhibit to like, ever circle through the WAM was the Ray Pettibon/Ed Ruscha show called The Holy Bible and THE END (some works from it if you scroll down here), which had the same sort of appeal to me; deliberate narratives shaping the way we understand imagery is really my forté.

Some other seriously gorgeous work by Zohar Nir-Amitin can be found on his website.