Blackout Poetry. Poetry made from literally blacking out erroneous, unwanted words from a printed page. Making something new out of the before.
Art that has not yet been taken up by the establishment as of yet; anyone can do it.
[I’ve blogged about the virtues of accessibility in art before (well actually I stole a quote from the German painter George Grosz), and I think it’s really important. However, I will save that discussion for another post.]
In the meantime check out this cool new movement; this is big already, but it’s going to be even more massive.
This is a video of the Art Upstart, who is an abstract painter whom I have followed since I came across his social media campaign in late 2009 (which attempted to see whether he could gain as much popularity, in Google search terms, as the artists featured on the BBC’s School of Saatchi when it was running on TV). His brand was ostentatiously anti art establishment then, and now it’s even more so.
Clearly a very savvy character, James ‘The Art Upstart’ Hogan, has centred his bid for popularity by associating himself with the bid to fight against the convention which creates public artists today - the art establishment itself, or the influential tastes of an incredibly small clique.
His campaign for exposure, which markets his work by skillfully blending its exhibition online with a discussion of what is art itself (and what should be deemed ‘artistic’), is clearly territory for the social media age; a strange mysterious land in which ‘community engagement’ is of course the plat du jour. Appropriately, his campaign exists to encourage that his worth is judged not only by his actual work, but by how the public have engaged with him - his front page proudly promotes his Twitter & Flickr communities, and he has openly campaigns to have his personal brand ranked on Google. To use the words of the man himself:
In successfully ‘empowering’ us, he most importantly empowers himself; appropriately he has now published a book with high plaudits from towering figures in the popular media such as Greg Dyke, Adam Boulton, and Andrew Neil, and has an upcoming exhibition in Cork Street, the bastion of London’s art scene. You might also have caught this article in the Evening Standard today.
For more on his work check out his fascinating blog, which clearly shows that his creative skills lie not only in art itself.
There are photographers and then there are photographers.
Indre Serpytye’s State of Silence concerns itself with her father’s death in mysterious circumstances (he was the Head of Government Security in Lithuania and died in a ‘car accident’), and is one of the most striking, visually stunning things that I have seen for a long time.
Exploring the human consequences of a governmental cover up, we see the results of the cold clandestine machine on the individual. Visually spare, her images present the objects from around the event as nothing more than what they are; cold shells of the things they used to represent.
Against a sombre black background there remains a silenced telephone, a useless type writer, shredded papers, and an expired passport.
Please go to check out her website, it’s that bloody good.
“My aim is to be understood by everyone. I reject the ‘depth’ that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. This expressionistic anarchy has got to stop… A day will come when the artist will no longer be this bohemian, puffed-up anarchist but a healthy man working in clarity within a collectivist society.”
![Blackout Poetry. Poetry made from literally blacking out erroneous, unwanted words from a printed page. Making something new out of the before.
Art that has not yet been taken up by the establishment as of yet; anyone can do it.
[I’ve blogged about the virtues of accessibility in art before (well actually I stole a quote from the German painter George Grosz), and I think it’s really important. However, I will save that discussion for another post.]
In the meantime check out this cool new movement; this is big already, but it’s going to be even more massive.
For more info and examples, check out the Newspaper Blackout blog itself. Also check out the blog of Austin Kleon, from whom this movement seems to have sprung from.
(via ashleymangan)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l2kgqntejr1qzqmo1o1_500.jpg)
