art > art i love

jenny holzer inflammatory essays absolutely foundational for me. god i can't get enough of these. her truisms are good if overused, but these are far and away her best work. faves are 'shriek when the pain hits during interrogation' and 'snakes are evil incarnate'. read them all. some will disgust you, some will delight you, some will rewire your brain.	desmond paul henry untitled AI worries are nothing new, and making art with computers isn't either. henry made these with targeting computers from WWII (a thing i had no idea existed?!). i like this one because it looks like a head. computers dreaming of their targets. in the moment of explosion?
william wegman reduce / increase beautifully transgender. wegman is apparently not? but like. come on dude. googling it I found an artforum article which said "Photographing himself for Reduce/Increase, 1977, Wegman may don a wig and a see-through party dress, but his breasts will always be too small, his waist too wide, the legs in need of a good shave. Any attempt to universalize the ideal can only lead to silliness, burlesque". hm.	josé maría velasco the great comet of 1882 the national gallery exhibition cost twelve bloody pounds, for like two rooms of paintings. they were great paintings but i still felt a bit ripped off. either way, this is apparently one of the last paintings velasco ever did, on the eve of the mexican revolution, remembering when he saw the comet 28 years ago. idk i just think that's gorgeous. hope springs eternal.
franz stuck the sin hot. and just kinda had an effect on me. i've had a lot of twinges (like the henrietta franklin portrait i use as a bio pic), but this was the first time i saw something that made me go 'woah, women can look like that? / that looks like me! / can i look like that?'. what i'm saying is that there's a distinct but unmistakable transgender vibe. did you notice the snake?	walter crane the workers maypole i think my dad had this hanging up when i was a kid? and now i've got a print of it hanging up in my studio. a reminder that manifestos can be beautiful as well as visionary. they don't need to promise nothing and print starmers ham face on the front. the cause of labour is the hope of the world.
christelle oyiri in a perpetual remix, where is my own song? this is a 12 minute show, but I sat in there for at least an hour watching it over and over. an artist who absolutely understands the violence and horror of being seen, and that art is fundamentally a conversation between yourself and the world. erotic, horrifying, funny. completely serious and utterly unpretentious - there's a part of the video that made me laugh out loud for how steeped in toxic internet culture it was, without explaining the joke. eventually joyous, but only at the end of a long, unflinching road. the tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the bodies of the living.