Call to Order: the pretentious sterility of culture
"In a masterstroke of design, the curator of Chaos and Classicism, Kenneth Silver, chose a work of art to illustrate the Nazi annexation of neoclassicism that at first glance is anything but threatening. The Four Elements by Adolf Ziegler decorated the walls of Hitler's Munich apartment. A member of the Nazi Party, Ziegler was charged by Hitler in 1937 to stage-manage the purge of modern art in the notorious Exhibition of Degenerate Art. Ziegler's depiction of four nude women who symbolize fire, earth, air and water, the four elements of nature recognized in antiquity, personifies little but the pretentious sterility of culture under the Third Reich. Yet, it is the perfect embodiment of the banality of evil."
(Ed Voves, 4 October 2010)
Fig.1 Adolf Ziegler, The Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air, (Die vier Elemente. Feuer, Wasser und Erde, Luft), before 1937, Oil on canvas, three panels, left to right: 170.3 x 85.2 cm, 171 x 190.8 cm, and 161.3 x 76.7 cm, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Sammlung Moderner Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Hannah Starkey: reconstructed scenes from everyday life
"Using actors within carefully considered settings, Hannah Starkey's photographs reconstruct scenes from everyday life with the concentrated stylisation of film. Starkey's images picture women engaged in regular routines such as loitering in the street, sitting in cafes, or passively shopping. Starkey captures these generic 'in between' moments of daily life with a sense of relational detachment. Her still images operate as discomforting 'pauses'; where the banality of existence is freeze-framed in crisis point, creating reflective instances of inner contemplation, isolation, and conflicting emotion.
Through the staging of her scenes, Starkey's images evoke suggestive narratives through their appropriation of cultural templates: issues of class, race, gender, and identity are implied through the physical appearance of her models or places. Adopting the devices of filmography, Starkey's images are intensified with a pervasive voyeuristic intrusion, framing moments of intimacy for unapologetic consumption. Starkey often uses composition to heighten this sense of personal and emotional disconnection, with arrangements of lone figures separated from a group, or segregated with metaphoric physical divides such as tables or mirrors.
Often titling her work as Untitled, followed by a generalised date of creation, her photographs parallel the interconnected vagueness of memory, recalling suggestions of events and emotions without fixed location or context. Her work presents a platform where fiction and reality are blurred, illustrating the gap between personal fragility and social construction, and merging the experiences of strangers with our own."
(Saatchi Gallery)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
That Mitchell and Webb: we want your ad-hoc reckon
"What do you think about this issue? Do you have any thoughts? What are those thoughts? Will you tell us them? Any thoughts at all will do. If you have em -we want to hear them. Are you personally affected by this issue then email us or if you're not affected by this issue can you imagine what it would be like if you were? ..."
(BBC Two, UK)
That Mitchell and Webb Site "We want your Ad-hoc 'reckon'" Series Two, Episode Five
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Passionless Moments: the banality of everyday life
"Passionless Moments, as its title implies, is concerned less with the gathering up of individual scenes into an overall narrative than with their dispersion. And these are moments without deep emotion, without the passion erotic or otherwise that characterizes the later feature films. Instead, here and in Sweetie, Campion engages in what we might term a surreality of everydayness, in which ordinary, even trivial, incidents from a variety of people's lives receive comic evaluation."
(Dana Polan, 23 October 2006)
[1] Campion, J. and G. Lee (1983). Passionless Moments. Australia.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Simpsons: telling stories without endings
"We can't bust heads like we used to. But we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where was I... oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones..."
(The Internet Movie Database)
Fig.1 'The Simpsons - Last Exit to Springfield' (1993), season 4, episode 17.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
