Mon dieu, Julien!

Drinking the blood of christ out of a plastic cup or replacing chocolate with carob has never seemed to prove that the old and new could be a substitute of each other or even get along. Nevertheless, Canadian born Julien Vallée has proved us all wrong with an installation that uses both hand made and computer generated graphics. We hail at your designer throne, Julien!

Make sure to check out this young man's brilliant website.

Ain't no wire long enough.

Just when you were thinking you were pretty fly with your brand new flat screen desktop, you are proven wrong by UK born Sandy Smith. A wall, a circle, stacks of computers working together in perfect PC harmony to create masterpieces that resemble Chernobilian control rooms.

Any spare wires, anyone?

Below: the separate projects of Smith and some pictures of the control room in Chernobyl.

Jean Shin

Seoul born Jean Shin collects everyday objects and transforms them into visual poetry.

Next year, I am turning to empty glass yoghurt jars to decorate my salon wall. Tight.

"Lord of the graphics, I am your father."

You ain't seen nothing yet if you ain't seen John Whitney.

The space, personal.

Sometimes words resist translation, exactly like Thea Djordjadze's objects resist spatial dimensions. Objects are the Georgian artist's mood boards, incomplete until set up in the space of exhibition.

With a creative process clearly visible through the cracks and layers of different materials used for the art work, Djordjadze defies the absolute idea of time and replaces it with a relational, more personal vision.

LAX ART, Full stop.

I need you in my life.

Forever.

My favourite place in the world.

Architectural spheres

Currently on view at LAX ART gallery in Los Angeles, California, is Gregory Michael Hernandez's 'Rebuilt Homestead'.

The artist takes the three most important elements of architecture, wood, cement and steel and creates a world of unexpected cohesiveness. This latest brainchild of Hernandez is a blueprint of a destroyed home blended with the artist's innermost thoughts: a skeleton model of what looks like a complicated sphere.

I must say, the first time I saw these pictures earlier today, they took my breath away.

I will be waiting for more.

Below: the inspiration, a model of the construction in the desert, the actual creation at LAX ART Los Angeles.

Duncan and the rotating shapes.

Behold, some youtube links. Don't halt here though, the real shizzle is on this man's genius website.

Please take a moment to browse through his kingdom:

Duncan Malashock

and this...

"CAN I COME OVER TO YOUR HOUSE"

"Were your parents throwing a party at your house on Saturday?"

Yes, it was an art opening."

Born in Wisconsin in the sixties and proud possessor of several MFA's in Art history and criticism, artist Michelle Grabner has founded one of the most remarkable art spaces in the world.

A family gallery equipped of several studios, Grabner invites a choice of artists over to her house to create, exhibit and live in an almost public atelier. The attention put to the importance of good energies and connection of the space and herself with the elected artists, create an altogether particular atmosphere for exhibitions that ooze personality.

A must see in Oak Park, Chicago.

Above, in order: two works of Grabner herself, The Suburban, Grabner in The Suburban, current exhibitions of Garth Weiser and Francesca DiMattio.

Israel, through a lens.

Artists in Israel, Israeli artists on Israel.

Yael Bartana, born in 1970 in Afula, Israel, and graduated at the Bezalel Academy of Art and design, has come to be one of the country's most sought after film makers, notorious for her documentary-style films. Often in slow motion, Bartana's work manages to capture details of the undisclosed, intimate moments of a population, the moments where every single movement of uncertainty is caught by the all seeing lens of the artist.

The theme of Bartana's work often potrays the relationship between Israeli social rituals and the search for an identity, contested. Her recent work 'Mary Koszmary' (2007), is an investigation of the troubled encounter between Zionism and European Anti-Semitism, which lead to the creation of the State of Israel. Through 'Dreams and Nightmares'(translation of polish 'Mary Koszmary')Bartana raises questions about the future of her homeland and creates a comparative work between Poland and Israel, influenced by Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 nazi propaganda film,'Triumph of the Will'.

“There are a small percentage of intellectuals and a small Left. Both we and they are nations living with the trauma of the past and constantly struggling with the search for identity and definition.”

Bruce, I want to have your babies.

BHQFU IS:

A university, a space for higher education and research, a community of scholars; an expansion of the BHQF practice to include more participants (that's where U come in); and a "fuck you" to the hegemony of critical solemnity and market-mediocre despair.

PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE ART SCHOOL

Something’s got to give. The $200,000-debt-model of art education is simply untenable. Further, the education artists are getting for their money is mired in irrelevance, pushing them into critical redundancy on the one hand and professional mediocrity on the other. Blind romanticism and blind professionalism are in a false war alienating artists from their better histories.

At root, it’s a form/content problem. Arts education is divided between the practical problems of form (e.g., money: how to get it, raise it, administer it, and please the powers that control it) and the slippery problems of metaphor (e.g., education: how to learn, what to learn, why to learn).

Artists are the people who spend their time figuring out how best to resolve form and content problems. That’s what we do when we stretch a canvas, edit a video, implement a social space, and develop a history. It is both reasonable and generatively ridiculous to believe that artists ought to be figuring out how arts education should work. This is the premise of BHQFU: that artists can figure this thing out.

"Chairtables"

Chen Zhen (1955-2000 Shanghai): an exploration between ying and yang, east and west and the relationship between humans and objects.

China's first major sculpture artist prepared a fertile soil for Asian contemporary art which often defied occidental traditions. An extravagant elegance of which I just can't get enough.