31.12.12
30.12.12
27.12.12
Snow in Toronto
Our garden looked like this on Christmas morning.
On Boxing Day night, a blizzard blew through Toronto and dumped lots of snow
After multiple shovellings and once the snow stopped, the garden looked like this
25.12.12
24.12.12
Christmas tree in progress #AdventPhoto
Almost finished decorating the Christmas tree -- icicles are the only thing left to add
Tomte, the new star and the Christmas tree
A tomte from Stockholm on the top of the as yet un-iced, but covered in marzipan, cake
The tree -- almost finished decorating it
The small tree
Related blog post: Old star cast aside
23.12.12
Old star cast aside
I set up and started decorating our Christmas tree on Saturday, but I didn't finish it.
I also hung Christmas balls from wire on the staircase
22.12.12
21.12.12
In the shadow of his wife: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo
An exhibition featuring the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera currently on show at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) would have sparked heated debate in the late 20th century, but in today’s post-feminist world the pairing sidesteps controversy altogether.
In the past, celebrating a woman artist side-by-side with her husband would have been seen by feminists as a sign of her oppression by the patriarchy. However, traditional feminist debate about women artists, which has historically centred on a fight for individual recognition in a male-dominated art world -- so common in decades gone by -- is not mentioned in the AGO show or in the exhibition catalogue.
Instead, curator Dot Tuer inverts the tradition that would have cast Kahlo in Rivera’s shadow and celebrates Kahlo’s artistic abilities, proposing that the powerful feminine themes of her work have eclipsed the outmoded activist bent of Rivera’s.
Rivera reached international renown as a communist mural painter in the 1920s, depicting the Mexican revolution and class struggle, while Kahlo -- 20 years his junior -- was at the time more modestly acclaimed by the surrealist movement and the Mexican art world for works focused on her own personal suffering.
“Rivera no longer looms larger-than-life in the public imagination as Mexico’s greatest muralist accompanied by a much younger and diminutive wife,” Tuer says in the exhibition catalogue. “Instead, Frida is seen as the iconic artist with Diego cast in a minor role as her much older and philandering husband.
“Numerous exhibitions have enshrined her as one of modernism’s most profound women artists, whose self-portraits embody both the physical suffering she endured after a debilitating bus accident and the spiritual anguish caused by Rivera’s infidelity and her inability to have children.”
Rivera’s reputation declined during the Cold War and with the rise of abstract expressionism, Tuer writes, his work now dismissed as cartoonish political propaganda, despite major retrospectives in Mexico City, London and Detroit since the mid-1980s.
These supportive claims for Kahlo’s work must surely mark sweet victory for such feminist art critics as Lucy Lippard, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock who struggled in the latter part of the 20th century to stake a place for forgotten women artists on gallery walls in the world’s major art collections.
Also for such artists as Judy Chicago who sought to generate valid “herstory” through her internationally recognised “Dinner Party” and “Birth Project” art exhibitions of the 1970s and 1980s.
The installations, which featured ceramic plates and tapestries, named women whose importance Chicago said had been largely written out of history. She argued that craft should be considered art and that art made by women should be taken seriously by the establishment.
Such universal concerns led eventually to the creation of a women’s art museum in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1987.
“By its very existence, the National Museum of Women in the Arts challenges the unequal representation of female artists in other museums, in galleries, and in major shows and offers an important and national alternative space,” wrote art historian Alessandra Comini in the 1987 museum catalogue.
Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting, which closes at the AGO on Jan. 20, 2013, before re-opening at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art on Feb. 14, offers an unapologetic perspective on Kahlo as an equal with her husband, not as a victim toiling in his shadow.
More than 80 drawings and paintings, accompanied by photographs of the couple show how their lives were intertwined, despite troubles that led to their divorce and remarriage.
Not long before Kahlo died in 1954 at age 47, she referred to Rivera as “my child, my son, my mother, my father, my husband, my everything.”
Rivera referred to Kahlo’s death as the most tragic day of his life.
“Too late now I realised that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida,” he said.
Picture credit: Hospital Henry Ford, 1932, oil on metal, from the
Collection Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico. Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society, New York.
________________________________________
Addendum
Bloody Caesar
18.12.12
17.12.12
15.12.12
14.12.12
13.12.12
12.12.12
11.12.12
#ADN dance party set to shake, rattle n roll Christmas across continents
The news dropped into the final half hour of tonight's #MondayNightDanceParty (MNDP) on App.net (ADN) -- the weekly bash is set to go global for the first time on Christmas Eve, said disc jockey @jdscolam, adding that his tag-team alternates for the 24-hour event will be DJs @sham, @po and @michelelewis.
For weeks, virtual MNDP tunes have been spun by Oklahoma-based @jdscolam, making it difficult for those outside the south-central U.S. to participate.
The DJ trio plan to play tunes using the MNDP.tv Vidcast interface hosted on ADN, conceived and developed over the past few months by @duerig, @33mhz, @q and @ryantharp.
The setup allows users to post music requests via a chat room within which they can also interact. Requests and related chatter can also be broadcast into the main update streams of ADN participants.
The Christmas Eve event will be semi-automated, @duerig said, adding: "We'll have DJs in several timezones ... interacting and mostly letting it go on autopilot so people can have it on in the background to listen to."
Users are also being urged to post Christmas greetings using the hashtag #MNDPHolidayGreeting or to upload via a specially set up Patter room, so they can be compiled and played during the gala event.
"It can be a song, or anything you want," @duerig said. " A 30-second video of yourself is the idea. But could be you doing anything. Just post the YouTube link. And if you want to just do audio, we've got a way to upload that, too."
@Sham will kick off events at 1300 on Dec. 24, 2012, in Singapore. @po will broadcast later in the day from
"The playlists will start about 1pm in each of our local timezones, though @po and I may not be on and hanging out right then" said @jdscolam. "We'll announce the hangout times later."
In general, outside of the official MNDP event, users can post YouTube songs on ADN with the hashtag #jukebox and they will play automatically in a Vidcast environment, becoming part of a stream of songs.
Visiting http://vidcast-app.net allows users to create a stream event that others can join. If users want to try "jukebox mode", which will play the tunes as if by an automated DJ, they can visit http://vidcast-app.net/view and the feed will play YouTube links with the #jukebox hashtag.
App.net was set up by developers, for developers, as a sort of online refuge independent from advertisers -- allowing creative freedom and more entrepreneurial activity. It was launched as a subscription service in the summer.
It was also meant to strike at the heart of Twitter, which has become increasingly commercial, exclusive and more difficult for developers to use as a platform for innovation over the past six years.
ADN allows for 256 characters as opposed to Twitter’s 140, meaning there is more in-depth conversation – less broadcast, more chat.
For more info from the organisers, visit #MondayNightDanceParty Christmas Special
Related posts: