Fucking rad

J Strange

remix  r kell's   n u m b e r   _  o n e  _   s e x

Number one sex

http://tropicozy.tumblr.com/

While his efforts in this respect are admirable and insightful, more remarkable is the second, twinned vector of his inquiry, which moves towards refashioning understanding "such that it is made to resonate with our own imagined or imaginary experiences." As he notes, if Wittgenstein's formulation is correct, the fact that the formulation itself is "grounded as non-founded is nothing less than a possibility for nonsense that is nevertheless 'praised into' existence -- rendered in terms of imaginary plausibility rather than argumentative demonstration." In this respect, it doesn't just expose contingency, but actually leverages the most radical senses of the term in order to formulate an aesthetic strategy towards -- as opposed to a logical description of -- postmodern culture.
“The design process never starts or finishes. I am always hoping to find something through the mere act of living my daily life. I do not work from a desk, and do not have an exact starting point for any collection. There is never a mood board, I do not go through fabric swatches, I do not sketch, there is no eureka moment, there is no end to the search for something new. As I live my normal life, I hope to find something that click starts a thought, and then something totally unrelated would arise, and then maybe a third unconnected element would come from nowhere. Often in each collection, there are three or so seeds of things that come together accidentally to form what appears to everyone else as a final product, but for me it is never ending. There is never a moment when I think, ‘this is working, this is clear.’ If for one second I think something is finished, the next thing would be impossible to do.
“Often the elements are completely disassociated in time and dimension. One might be an emotion, the next thing a pattern image, the third thing an object or a picture I have seen somewhere. I can never remember when and from where the elements come together in my head. I trust synergy and change. For the new line, I was thinking about no design being design, about very ordinary fabric (wool felt) being strong. Somehow, the two-dimension level of thinking became apparent.
“I do not feel happy when a collection is understood too well. For me, my last work was too easily understood, the concept too clear. I feel better about the future, because it wasn’t too clear, and some people assumed things it had nothing to do with, like the Internet.
“The struggle to find something new gets more and more difficult with time and experience, so this time my feeling was to try to make a collection by doing very little.”

What has protected their reputation is essentially a non-marketing marketing strategy, designed to leave customers feeling satisfied with a purchase but ultimately unwelcomed. As a result, customers essentially try and buy their way in. It has become the beautiful girl we can never have — she just never seems that interested, in turn magnifying our desires for her affection. And it works. After all, there is no quicker way to lose a customer than to make them feel like you’re desperate for money. The owner and founder has even acknowledged this calculated ambivalence, stating, “We work very hard to make everything look effortless.” He’s also divulged that he always tries to under-manufacture, so theoretically everyone who wants one, can’t get one. “We’ve never really been supply-demand anyway. If we can sell 600, I make 400.” What perhaps better captures the attitude is the lack of interviews he has given since launching the brand. Perhaps he knows better than most that overstating the creative process that goes into products takes the fun and magic out of them.

"In the next room, a large “Standard #23 (grey)” from 1998 stands against one wall on hardwood blocks, an aspect of the installation that serves to enhance the object quality of the painting. On an adjacent wall, “Portrait of a Standard #3 (silver)” (2000), a photo-silkscreened version of a standard piece angled to the plane of the canvas, also stands on little hardwood blocks. The canvas and blocks provide information about qualities of the object that are missing from the silkscreened image, while the angled image of the photo-silkscreen exhibits properties that are both similar to and different from those of the painted object. Light reflecting off the silver silkscreened bands jumps out from the image at certain vantage points, and at others nearly disappears, but the implications of the artist’s position, as embedded in these works, require thought. Object and image are so fitfully intertwined in this constellation, any attempt to separate them becomes labyrinthine and begs the question of what it means to do so."

His work can be understood as one vast engagement with cultural memory. His paintings, drawings and sculptures on mythological subjects have come to form a significant part of that memory. Usually drawing on the most familiar gods and heroes, he restricts himself to just a few, relatively well-known episodes, as narrated by poet-historians, given visible shape by artists and repeatedly reinterpreted in the literature and visual art of later centuries.....His special medium is writing. Starting out from purely graphic marks, he developed a kind of meta-script in which abbreviated signs, hatchings, loops, numbers and the simplest of pictographs spread throughout the picture plane in a process of incessant movement, repeatedly subverted by erasures. Eventually, this metamorphosed into script itself

One could say that any child could make a drawing like tropicozy only in the sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as Pollock.  In none of these cases would it be true. In each case the art lies not so much in the finesse of the individual mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of personal "rules" about where to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop, in such a way as the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art.

They’re beyond what acting is. They’re so modern. They don’t want to do anything but exist and they want to be famous for just existing. I mean, they don’t drink water; they just live off of Red Bull and Vicodin. They’re almost like shape shifters. They’re these incredibly fucked-up delinquent scumbag poets.