Sexy Girls

6:29 PM anjal

The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view - whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dali, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game - these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia - preside over his life, as over ours.
"Introduction" to Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali (1974)

Future Shock

1:50 PM anjal

Future Shock (Orson Welles Intro)
Uploaded by donaldtheduckie

"Stephan Jung is not interested in painting except as a means to an end and his paintings are not picturesque."

2:16 PM anjal

Surfing the net this morning I was pleased to discovered yet another great artist, but then was bewildered and repelled by this obtuse press release that to be fair must surely suffer somewhat in translation:
Galerie Hammelehle und Ahrens presents Stephan Jung:

Despite the fact that this involves an artist who paints and his paintings, it would a waste of effort to approach the paintings via the painting operation. Stephan Jung is not interested in painting except as a means to an end and his paintings are not picturesque. They are not improvisations, there are no competing coatings and motives superimposed, no action-orientated superimposition, juxtaposition or interwovenness, in other words no ascertainable painting activism.

umm..they are paintings. If he's not interested in painting then why not just leave them as photos ? They look pictaresque to me..they are quite active and exciting paintings. It goes on:

There are models for practically all pictures, including those whose shape and structure textures seem like pure inventions - colourful, shadow-casting of light or bright colour spots which seem to absorb ornamental linkages without depiction content out of their own rules. The painted picture frees itself from the model, whether a photo or a concrete object, and becomes independent of it. Abstraction arises from distortion. This is why Jung’s pictures move around in a zone between realism and abstraction. The definitive lies in seeing and in the surface, in the difference between object and picture, the non-hierarchical iconography of the mundane.- Giti Nourbakhsch

yep..it definately sounds like you are talking about paintings..which makes me wonder why the writer of this press release wen't to such great lengths in his opening salvo to deny and repress what later on he writes with such Germanic akwardness about. ITS ALRIGHT TO PAINT PEOPLE! GET OVER IT!