This Filthy World: A Birthday Toast to John Waters

"For queer artists of Mr. Trecartin’s generation, cross-dressing, cross-identifying and cross-thinking are part of a state of being, not statements of political position. Like the work of John Waters and Jack Smith, his art is about just saying no to life as we think we have seen it and saying yes to zanier, virtual-utopian possibilities."
Holland Cotter, "Video Art Thinks Big: That's Showbiz." The New York Times, January 6, 2008.
Read the full article here

Thank you, John Waters, for asking us to live a little bit more absurdly.
From all of us here at the BowThrowers Headquarters, happy birthday.

(#3)

Etiquette

the proper response after having to meet someone in order to have a heavy conversation: "you could have told me that through an IM... asshole."

Notes

(#2)

Notes on "Notes"

"Notes" is a collaborative drawing project by Jessie Katz and Jesse Wells, existing between exquisite corpse-type surrealist games and the contemporary graphic novel. Each Note is an off-the-cuff reaction to the world immediately around us, as it unfolds, in real-time. We concern ourselves only with those people and things in our physical proximity, and rely on the nearby as synecdoche for the larger networks that our world is woven into. The quickness of our drawing technique, the incomplete look of our images, and the use of lined paper torn from a small notebook imply a certain urgency of communication, despite the casual attitude of the Note being communicated. The finished product is presented as if it were only a draft, a preliminary study, as if it could not afford the time to become a fully realized work. If art is to survive in the digital age, it must move at the speed of the digital age -- and yet not admit to trying too hard.

The Notes are ballpoint and ink pen on notebook paper - media that some find troubling, as they are non-archival. Can a work truly be fine art if it is not made with archival inks, on fine art paper? How long will the work last before it fades or yellows? One hundred years? Fifty? Five? What will be it's value to collectors? Yet the fate of the original drawn object is of little concern to us. It is our matrix; the scanner is our press bed; the work itself now exists along the information super highway, and will exist there for the life span of that highway. (What medium could be more archival than html?)

We have created a print in an edition of infinity.

We believe in the democratic multiple, the possibilites of DIY mass-production, and the power of the blog to free us from the object-oriented concerns of traditional art forms.

Notes

#1 (Stimulants For a Less Boring Art)