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just in case my true feelings about Marc Quinn dont get published…
MARC QUINN : ALLANAH, BUCK, CATMAN, CHELSEA, MICHAEL, PAMELA AND THOMAS
I’m glad I brought some friends with me to this exhibition. Full of easy associations and, well, nothing, QUINN once again failed to move me in any way, and I am glad that I wasn’t the only one.
The first things that caught my attention were the huge marble heads of Michael Jackson, titled ‘Man in the Mirror’. They are negatives of each other, one with black skin, one with white. It seemed to me to be a very easy statement to make, and one with little or no meaning beyond “Michael Jackson was black and then Michael Jackson was white”. The fact that everyone knows this robs Quinn’s piece of any shock value, and the lack of any deeper meaning rendered it a very dull piece of work indeed. Obvious art, rather than shock art, dominated the entire exhibition.
The paintings on the walls were of flowers in negative colours. Beyond the association of flowers and genitalia, there was little or no link between the paintings and sculptures, and the difference in colour pallette caused the whole thing to jar slightly. On their own, the paintings could be quite decorative pieces suitable for restaurants, perhaps, but I failed to see any profound meaning in them.
All the sculptures depicted enhanced human forms, often altered beyond recognition. An interesting basis for an exhibition, no? Well, maybe if I hadn’t already seen them all on Channel 4 documentaries. ‘My Monkey Baby’, however, never claimed to be high art.
‘Buck and Allanah’, a sculpture in polished bronze of two individuals who have had hormone therapy and transgender operations, recalls Adam and Eve standing hand in hand. This piece is another example of an obvious juxtaposition that doesn’t really do the ideas behind it justice, but the fact that it did make me think makes it, in my opinion, the most successful piece. The idea of a new First Couple threw up lots of possible meanings: a new race? A new paradigm of humanity? Reassignment of gender roles? Although I realise that ambiguity can be a powerful tool in the hands of an artist, the fact that, for me, this was the piece that stood out most meant that I would have like it to have given more of a direction to the exhibition as a whole.
Quinn’s works depict a modern day freak show, and if their purpose was to highlight the fact that we are still obsessed with abnormality, then maybe this exhibition might have afforded slightly more interest. The press release certainly suggests that Quinn was investigating the public’s, and his own, fascination with altered bodies, but I felt it simply didn’t come through in his work. Here was an exhibition that had turned from scrutinising freak shows to becoming one; Quinn’s sculptures made no statement about the people they were representing, and I felt that they were more of an advertisement, a sign saying “look these people really exist”. He might as well have just asked them all to come and stand in a room for a day for us to gawp at.
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telly
i fucking love telly so much. atm, its ashes to ashes and eastenders that float my boat.
ashes to ashes (Keeley Hawes and Philip Glenister) is, for me, the most exciting programme on tv. time travel and detectives? what could be better. so many theories as to what happens, and only 2 episodes left! soon all will be revealed….
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LHC to aim for a collision event beginning Tuesday, March 30
On March 19, CERN reached an all-time energy record, managing to fire up two separate proton beams in opposite directions at 3.5 trillion electron volts (TeV). That’s huge. That amount of energy is equivalent to the energy created by a fully-loaded aircraft carrier going 8 knots (about 9 mph). In comparison, the next most powerful accelerator—the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois—can reach a maximum of nearly 1 TeV. Well, now CERN is stepping up its game. In the early hours of March 30, they’ll begin working the two proton beams into a collision course, reaching a new record of 7 TeV.
Steve Myers, CERN’s director for accelerators and technology, describes the challenge of lining up the beams as being akin to “firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way.”
The scientists are looking for clues to the Higgs-Boson, the proverbial blank spot in the standard model of physics, the particle which allegedly gives mass to all the matter in the universe. They’re also looking for clues about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Please direct all black hole questions to the right.
EDIT: success!
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Done all my articles, will post links when they’re up
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Three Articles due up on Monday- and I’ve been ill! However, one is on the new Jean Nouvel building, which is hot stuff, so should be interesting and exciting.
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Sketchbook!
Wooooo! Am now part of the writing team for Sketchbook magazine- watch this space for more details, and details of what I’m up to as an ace reporter
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The Moon is rich with water and in the commercial space age, we're going to be rich with the Moon.
Following November’s news of the discovery of water in a crater on the south pole of the moon, recent data from a joint NASA/ISRO scan shows more than 600 metric tons (590 imperial tons) of water on the Moon’s north pole. The water likely settled there over the Moon’s long history, collected from floating dust and comet tails. What’s important about this discovery in light of the commercialization of the space industry is that it makes the Moon an attractive target of future business. The main components of rocket fuel are hydrogen and oxygen, meaning a rocket could take off from the Earth and fuel up at the Moon before taking off for elsewhere.
Our collective actions over the past few decades point to a future in which space is a Capitalism. The Moon provides a number of opportunities and it’s conveniently located right in our cosmic backyard. H20 plots could be claimed or bought and the raw materials harvested and refined for use by rockets—which, if the current trend continues, will be privately owned as well—leaving the Earth. More daring businesses could fund searches of the Moon for Helium-3, an isotope of Helium with two protons and a single neutron (as opposed to common Helium, which has two neutrons). Helium-3 can be used in nuclear fusion, the same process which takes place in stars like our Sun. Fusion produces significantly more energy than any other efforts we’ve made (including nuclear fission, the process which takes place in bombs and nuclear power plants). Due to a number of factors conveniently true of the Moon, Helium-3 should in theory be present in abundance but we’ve yet to make a significant effort to track it down. Helium-3 is our most promising hope for a clean-burning, non-fossil fuel that would satisfy our energy needs in vast excess.
There is a lot of money to be made on the Moon and discoveries such as this do well to increase its already high market value. It’s very likely that today’s students will be leaders of tomorrow’s lunar industry.
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Why hello…
