Wax That Ass, Allison Bouganim. Images courtesy of the artist
What do laundromats, bus stops, and supermarkets have in common? Besides being everyday locales, these seemingly innocuous sites are also hotbeds of sexual harassment. Wax That Ass, a project by artist Allison Bouganim, fuses sculpture, photography, and on-site intervention to explore the everyday discomfort felt in public places.
Bouganim began the project by making a series of sculptural butts cast from actual butts. The results were a series of plaster and wax butts (hence the project title, Wax That Ass) in a variety of different shades that seem to represent a spectrum of skin tones. Once these were made, Bouganim went to a series of sites that are not only breeding grounds for sexual harassment, but are also places where the artist herself has been sexually harassed before, to enact the performative aspect of her project.
Stopping at the beach, a train station, and even the outside of a church, the artist performed a series of guerrilla-style public interventions, propping up her wax butts and quickly photographing them in these unassuming sites of discomfort before leaving the scene, butts-in-hand. The final result is a series containing 16 photographs of the butts in 10 different locations, essentially miniature monuments to one of humanity’s most degenerate behaviors.
Naturally, the act of carrying enormous wax butts and inserting them in public and commercial places isn’t something everyone is fond of, especially in light of the swept-under-the-rug truth they are representing: “The process was definitely interesting,” Bouganim tells The Creators Project. “When I set the sculptures at the Metrorail, a man saw me carrying a sculpture in each hand started yelling across the station saying ‘You call that art? Ugh! GARBAGE!’ as he walked in the direction opposite from me.”
“When I set the sculptures up at that beach, I had a mix of different reactions. There was one woman who thought they were hilarious and left to grab her friends from tanning to interact with them. Other people glared at them and smirked,” the artist adds. “This one family was walking past others interacting with the sculptures and a little boy went to go touch one of the sculptures, and his mom very quickly hit his hand down and rushed him away from the sculptures as if I had subjected their family to some ungodly scene.”
Somewhat surprisingly, the supermarket proved to be the most problematic location for the artist: “On one occasion, I set the sculptures up in a grocery store and took pictures of them in the meat section. I had about 120 seconds to walk in, get to the meat section, place the sculptures, and photograph them before I was thrown out.” “The manager took a photo of my ID, my license plate, and the inside of my car where I put the sculptures, and demanded me to delete the images. He banned me from that store and called other managers in the district to ban me from that particular chain of grocery stores as well.
In spite of the struggles Bouganim faced to make her images, the combination of humorous absurdity and poetic politics that the final photographs embody seems well worth the effort.
View the full details of Allison Bouganim’s Wax That Ass and other works by the artist on her website.
Original art, including two preliminary watercolor drawings, and the final iconic cover by Garth Williams from Charlotte’s Web, published by Harper & Brothers, 1952.
"What’s most remarkable about Rebirth is the size and time frame," explains Chazen Museum of Art editor Kirstin Pires. In the 9,520 hours he worked as an artist-in-residence at the Madison, WI art institution, he broke 400 pen tips, emptied 20 bottles of ink, and covered 130 square feet of canvas. "While his previous works certainly represent autobiographical elements, this one really covers three years of his life."
Over the course of creating Rebirth, Ikeda fathered two daughters and injured his right shoulder, both of which Pires says are visible in the art. In a correspondance with Ikeda during the illustration process mid-July, the artist describes the incident to The Creators Project: "I dislocated my right shoulder in skiing accident last January." This had an immediate impact on Rebirth. "The first three months after the injury, I couldn’t use my right hand, so I worked with my left hand. I can use the right hand now, but it’s still weak and needs taking break every a hour. I have only four more months to finish the work, I can’t rest any more!"
In a previous interview, Ikeda describes how his 2008 work Foretoken, felt like a prediction of the tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011. Rebirth represents three years of reflecting on the disaster. There are brutal images of destruction embedded throughout. Crashed trains and planes, explosions, rubble stretching off into the distance, and refugees in green tents. But by taking a step back, one sees the big picture: a sturdy tree with vibrant pink petals and roots even greater than the waves crashing against them. Rebirth is fortified by the mandatory hope of a new father for the world his children are inheriting. Parts of it are ugly, but the taken together the whole is beautiful.
Manabu Ikeda's Rebirth was originally displayed at the Chazen Museum of Art, and is currently traveling to Japan. Keep up to date with the artist's work here.
learned some digestive stuff from this article, it's not just lambasting detox diets
'Tis the season for detoxes and misplaced hope. As a registered dietician and resident nutrition expert to my friends and family, I constantly get questions about detoxes and cleanses, especially as people are trying to move beyond their holiday-season gluttony.
Even if you do find yourself on the wrong end of a holiday binge, unfortunately, there's no evidence that drinking a series of juices, teas, or any of other so-called 'detox' products do anything besides profit the people selling them. Whenever I hear someone promoting a detox or a cleanse, I just roll my eyes and keep it moving. There are no shortcuts to health, yet plenty of "gurus" and celebs will tell you that drinking kale juice with activated charcoal can make you "toxin-free." These claims are everywhere from food blogs to food labels, and they've become falsely legitimized by their ubiquity. But there is good news!
Detoxification is a process that your body is already extremely well-equipped for, and there are certainly things you can do to support this—no quick fixes or miracles, but rather lifestyle choices that can give you a good baseline. I'm fully aware that it's not sexy to tell people to eat their vegetables, but it's the only advice that actually works… and it has the benefit of not costing $13 a bottle.
Too early to get overly excited, but this is the only good news I’ve heard all month:
“Ruminant animals are responsible for roughly 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions globally, so it’s not a small number,” said Kinley, an agricultural research scientist now working at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Queensland, Australia.
“We’re talking numbers equivalent to hundreds of millions of cars.”
Victory A. Lundy recalled that during his training, he “never listened, I was busy sketching.” But soon, “I sort of took to it. … war experience just hypnotizes young men.” When the aspiring architect was 19 years-old, he enlisted in the Army Special Training Program with a dream of helping to rebuilt post-war Europe. He never expected to end up on the beaches of Normandy in time for D-Day. Lundy was thrown into the US 26th Infantry Division in 1944, all the while sketching his way through WWII.
Many years later, after Lundy became a renowned American architect, he donated his visual diary of 158 pencil sketches to the Library of Congress. The eight surviving spiral sketchbooks (some were lost) are 3 x 5 inches and easily fit in his breast pocket. Sketching in pencil from May to November 1944, beginning with his training at For Jackson Carolina to vivid portraits of the frontline in France, Lundy says, “For me, drawing is sort of synonymous with thinking.”
“Before payday– shooting craps for cigarettes.”
“Planning a platoon attack”
“Son of a bitch”
“Ready to Go”
“Part of the Atlantic Wall, Quinéville 6 men from L Co. hurt here, 6 killed.”
“House where Kane & I got the roast chicken & cognac”
“Café where the 2 French girls bought us 4 bottles of cider, Quinéville”
“One of the 4-men German patrol who didn’t get back”
“View from my bunk”
“Camouflaged German gun position, beach at Quinéville”
OH FOLKS, there’s a brand new special Halloween episode of the only movie podcast in the world! This year’s Travis Bickle on the Riviera HELLOWEEN SPOOKTACULAR laser-focuses on the scariest movie ever made, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Your hosts Tucker Stone, Sean Witzke, and Morgan Jeske are here to discuss the history, backstory, and legacy of the movie and all it’s sequels. Also in this 2 hour extravaganza, we discuss how the mob got the film released, why only women write good books about horror movies, how Rob Zombie treated the series like a film school, the financial and cultural impact of the Platinum Dunes remake, Chainsaw from the movie Summer School, night terrors, the lost possibilities of the gore cuts of Texas Chainsaw 3, it’s impact on Alien, recalling gore that isn’t there, the impact the series had on the slasher and torture porn eras, and the difference between the early slashers and later ones. Featuring audio clips from Adam Simon’s classic The American Nightmare, a discussion of Carol J Clover’s lodestone of horror criticism Men, Women, & Chainsaws, and much much more. CHECK IT OUT! THE SAW IS FAMILY!
You can download episodes directly from itunes and rss. For a quick look at who has been on the show before and what movies have been discussed in each episode, look at our one-page episode guide. This is a Patreon-supported podcast, subscribing to the show can give you access to monthly criticism from Sean, Tucker, and Morgan.
You can follow the show on twitter, tumblr, letterboxd and facebook. If you like this show, please check out Tucker’s other podcast Comic Books Are Burning In Hell (also located at TFO and here), TFO’s music podcast Beat Connection with Marty Brown and Nate Patrin (at TFO and here), and Katie Skelly & Sarah Horrock’s Trash Twins (located here and here). The hosts are on twitter too - Tucker,Morgan, and Sean. Hail Satan.
While traveling through the Amazon to study reptile and amphibian diversity with the Herpetology Division at the University of Michigan, photographer Mark Cowan happened upon a strange sight: a caiman whose head was nearly covered in butterflies. The phenomenon itself isn’t particularly unusual, salt is critical to the survival of many creatures like butterflies and bees who sometimes drink tears from reptiles in regions where the mineral is scarce (we’ve seen the same thing happen with turtles). What made this sight so unusual was seeing the butterflies organize themselves into three different species groups atop the caiman’s head.
Uh, also, that side eye!
Cowan’s photograph received special commendation from the 2016 Royal Society Publishing photography competition, you can see the rest of this year’s finalists here.
This quick video demonstrates how to use a long elastic string anchored at the horizon of a canvas to sketch a drawing with two point perspective. With as many art and drawing classes I’ve taken, I’ve never seen this method used before. A more traditional and accurate method would involve a ruler and maybe a drafting table if you’re super fancy, but this seems like a great method for mocking up something quickly. The video posted on Facebook is uncredited and apparently came from Instagram. Anyone know the artist/designer? (via Reddit, The Awesomer)
“My younger sister was kidnapped. [REDACTED] hired some gangsters to do it. At the time, she had just graduated high school and was a university student. They did it to stop me testifying on behalf of Nintendo. As to how I got her back… I couldn’t take them on directly. So I used a truck crane to pick up one of [REDACTED]’s newly released arcade cabinets and smashed it in front of their main offices. I told them, ‘Next time, this is going to be one of you.’ And after that, my sister came home.”
Churches have bowling alleys? Yes, they do, but they’re a dying breed. There are thought to be less than 200 churches with bowling lanes left in America today, but as early as the 1860s, they were quite common across the Midwest and parts of the Northeast. It’s not the kind of thing you expect to find in a church, but where’s a place to pray, you might discover there’s also a place to play…
A church bowling alley certainly won’t have as many bells and whistles as a modern-day facility– but they will probably serve beer! One basement alley at St. Ann’s Catholic Church in Peoria, IL was even purposely built in 1945 to avoid the local liquor laws. At that time there was a law in place preventing the sale of alcohol before noon on Sundays, so to get around this law, the men’s club built the bowling alley as part of their “private” club, a loophole that allowed them the ability to serve beer before noon on Sundays.
Picture above in 1905 is another “men’s club” bowling alley in the basement of the Christ’s Church in New York (344 W. 36th Street). You can also make out a few billiard tables in the background. In working-class neighbourhoods, it wasn’t unusual at all for churches to have bowling alleys. Recreational facilities served as social gathering spots. If husbands were going to drink, better it be at his local church bowling alley than in a gambling establishment. It kept the youngsters out of trouble too, especially when bowling became so fashionable the 40s and 50s.
All types of churches built bowling alleys– Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Unitarian; and membership wasn’t necessarily a prerequisite to bowl. It was the German immigrants of the 1860s who first started building them as moral refuges for their community. In Milwaukee alone, the city once had at least 13 church bowling alleys. They started closing down in the 1980s and 90s and the ones remaining have since become urban legends…
The disused bowling alley in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church of Arlington, New Jersey (c) Adam Pantozzi
In 2012, the National Geographic show “Abandoned” visited Philadelphia’s historic Church of the Nativity, 60 days before it was demolished and sent in their salvage team to retrieve abandoned treasures from the past 170 years. In the basement, they find the incredible remains of a basement bowling alley; a true time capsule. Take a look at the clip…
Unfortunately, they seem more interested in how much they can sell it for pieces on eBay.
Here are some photos of a lovely preserved vintage bowling alley at the Trinity Lutheran Church in Peoria Illinois…
Sadly, this one doesn’t look like it’s seen much action lately. Of course, these hidden relics are great to look at and take pictures of, but if people don’t actually want to go bowling there, they’ll soon be replaced to make space for something else. Then again, you’d have to know the bowling alleys are actually there in the first place. While researching this post, I noticed most of the church’s websites don’t advertise their bowling facilities and my guess is, most of the local communities, particularly the younger generations, have no idea they even exist. With church attendance on the decline, these secret bowling alleys could very well disappear entirely…
Hopefully, the best-preserved and authentic alleys will survive the test of time and be saved from budget cuts, like Omaha’s Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, with its avocado green 10-lane alley built in 1955, pictured above and below.
“Enhancing the retro look and improving the marketing are part of an effort to boost business and keep balls rolling and pins falling for another 50 years”, Rev. John Brancich, told the Omaha World Herald. “The parish now sees it as a treasure.’’
I also came across this 2010 news clip from USA Today, who paid a visit to St. Ann’s Catholic Church (remember the one they built to skirt the local liquor laws), and it looked to still be going strong…
If you’re interested in finding a bowling alley church, here’s a list of a few to get you started…
Connelly Theatre, a former church in the East Village NY has a disused alley in the basement [Tip]
First Presbyterian Church of Arlington, New Jersey [Photos]
So the next time you pass by your local church, why not pop in and ask if they happen to have a bowling alley in their basement. If they do, Alley-lujah! (Sorry, couldn’t resist).
Jack Kirby published *22* comics the year he saw action at Omaha beach, then 6 more as he fought across France and Germany through v-e day. The King only managed *44* comics in his first year of service however. Ugh. Artists.
Remember when I said all 6 volumes of Bartkira would be done in one month? You probably don’t, because it was 3 years ago, but I’m still bowled over that there’s still this much enthusiasm and energy for this project, so late in its life cycle. Every week, I’m blown away by how our dumb pop culture mashup thing continues to surprise me and take on a life of its own.
This is by Chase Conley, who is one of my new favourite artists I found out about in the last year or so. He’s a character designer and storyboard artist working at Warner Bros right now. I also just saw my friend Nicole describe him as the “best booty meat artist in the game” so there’s that.
The cover at the top is a collage I made from 11 different people’s work, all of which you can see up on the Bartkira tumblr. The most dominant piece of work in the composition is by an Italian artist called No Curves who makes art by cutting tiny strips of tape and putting them onto layers of glass. It’s pretty amazing. I feel really lucky that we managed to get him since his focus these days seems to be huge installations for office buildings and, incredibly, the side of submarines.
We also got this mind-blowing variant cover for vol. 5 by Francisco Javier Ruiz. He’s a background artist for animation who has worked on that amazing Pig, Goat, Banana, Cricket cartoon among other things. He painted this entirely analog- “100% Real No Fake”, as he puts it. We got a lot of purely analog stuff for this volume- I painted my pages with gouache, too. It reminds me of what Daft Punk said about their decision to use all live instruments, no computers on their last album- “if everyone has the means and the tools of making magic, then it ceases to be magic”. This has got to be true, since everyone is drawing digitally now but it’s the analog work that looks like magic to me.
It is a solid volume! We’ve got some of my favorite people in this one. Also, for reasons I do not understand Rob Thompson of Pixar did 5 pages for us, too. He was the directing animator on The Good Dinosaur. What!?
A good amount of the people who worked on this submitted their pages three years ago and their pages are being seen for the first time now. A full list of contributors is at the back of the volume, but for now be on the lookout for work by:
Claude T.C. (Knocked his pages out of the park. If you have been to any UK comic convention in the past 10 years you have seen this man dressed as the Green Goblin)
Thanks, everyone, for still being interested in this insane thing. We’re going to take a break and concentrate on real life some more before we bring the final volume into the station, but the bartkiracommittee@gmail.com address is still open for business if you want to send your portfolios there- just, don’t expect any replies until mid-December or so. And Bartkira.com is the site where you can read all the volumes. Bartkira.tumblr.com is a pretty frequently updated blog showing all the new art as it comes out. Sometimes we have interviews and things on there, too.
And, I want to stress that as always, anyone is free to make their own Bartkira art, zines, books, and gallery shows, so long as all the profits are split between Save The Children and OISCA Coastal Forest Restoration Project.
Long live the Great Springfield Empire (and so forth),
Wax That Ass, Allison Bouganim. Images courtesy of the artist
Images courtesy Chazen Museum of Art
Many years later, after Lundy became a renowned American architect, he donated his visual diary of 158 pencil sketches to the Library of Congress. The eight surviving spiral sketchbooks (some were lost) are 3 x 5 inches and easily fit in his breast pocket. Sketching in pencil from May to November 1944, beginning with his training at For Jackson Carolina to vivid portraits of the frontline in France, Lundy says, “For me, drawing is sort of synonymous with thinking.”
