Artist Vesna Tusek, who I am pleased to say is my sister-in-law, forms, bends and welds these sculptures out of sheet iron into tubes filled with sand, in a “slow act of writing”. Like children’s “pretend writing”, which actually is emergent writing, these forms do not actually denote any particular words (at least not in my eyes ) but still are clearly a form of writing. Or sculptured poetry.
A great website celebrating street art is woostercollective.com. Here I found the images of Andrea Acosta’s street art project B-Side in Worpswede, Germany. She used the grey space on the backside of street signs as work surface covering them with shadow images of things, plants and leaves, patterns of nature.
She writes: … what to do with this realization, of how to make this space ‘alive’ but yet undisturbed. … how to point at something without intruding it? … when there is so many information already why does it make sense to add more?
… In a delicate but subversive way I use this forgotten space to question and subvert the functionality and language of signs in public space; through small subtle interventions I try to silently make visible this spaces, delicately inhabiting them and thus leading to a new direction in the streets.
… I guess its very true that the space is overcrowded, but when a poetic gap is opened, you can see something in a different way. As artists I think we have the power to interrupt the everyday, the people, the flow of something, to make something else visible; a brief moment of understanding that perhaps turns into a story, a comment, a conversation, perhaps only you change but certainly at the end energy is moving.
Spell with Flickr is a mashup application, which can be used to write with letters made of images people have uploaded on Flickr.
As easy as saying A B C.
I was looking for a particular website with great samples of old Viennese shop signs, but it seems to have been taken down. On Flickr I found plenty of images instead, notably two groups with retro shops worth having a look at here lukertl and plasticbag.
Most young people today would not be able to identify the names of all the plants in this plant alphabet. They would have less difficulty recognizing the brand names in an alphabet comprised of logos.
By Stay Free!
Delete! was a street art project two years ago, or public installation, where all shop signs, advertisments and logos were covered with yellow foil in one of Viennas busiest shopping streets. It was organized by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf, who had quite a job convincing all the shopkeepers. I remember looking for a particular shop and getting lost. Read more on various sites such as here and here and here and see more pictures on Flickr. It is related to Matt Siber’s The Untitled Project, where he digitally stripped photographs of urban settings of all traces of textual information.
Neubaugasse in Vienna
Digitally enhanced New York
Neda Bei has been taking pictures and cataloguing flowers and other plants in the urban enivronment of Vienna since the summer of 2005, and you can see the results on Rosa Mundi. Among them are images of brave plants fighting their way through brick, stone and tar.
This coincidental flickr find unites several personal meanings within one image. I have been researching early literacy and how children long before attending school are able to read (and appropriate) semiotic resources such as logos. The very first letter of the alphabet which I remember learning was the P, taught to me by my grandmother with the help of the “Palmers P” – Palmers being a well know chain of high street shops selling undergarments. The church shown is located close to where I live now. I wished I knew which saint is represented here, holding a golden branch, as I also spent years researching the “Tree of Life” in art and literature.
I found this graffiti on the house next door, in Haidgasse. “Das Leben ist schön” translated means “life is beautiful”.
In yesterday’s Standard, the Austrian newspaper, I found this image, Garten 1997, by Lois and Franziska Weinberger. The image shows a pile of old Standard papers, sprouting vegetation. Funny how, as soon as one starts a blog, patterns emerge – see my earlier post about floating books. I would love to own one of their paintings featured here.
I have made those with the concrete poetry generator – an interactive artwork by Jonny Norridge.
from here
This is a picture my father took of the old gate to Kaiser Mahal, the Garden of Dreams, in Kathmandu, which has been his most recent conservation project. Th wrought and cast iron gate spells out the word G A R D E N on one side and D R E A M S on the other. It is a very unusal garden, essentially an Edwardian garden with a slight Nepali touch right in the heart of Kathmandu.
“Concrete Poetry” : Giving it back to the Streets of NYC ” is a photoseries on 5 Cense Reviews by Derek White. Have a look.
Quotables
word and image 