I am a recently graduated BA Fine art student, this blog is intended to detail the ideas and construction of my studio practice. My work is about exploring the notion of taboo, censorship and obscenity. I recently started using digital manipulation, but primarily work in painting and drawing. My work often uses transgressive themes which contain nudity.If you are under 18 or feel you may be offended by this, please leave the site now. Thank you.
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Thursday, 31 May 2012
http://innerebel.wordpress.com/
This blog is really interesting, it is from someone i know. It is a kind of philosophical discussion on everyday things which can be really insightful. Her style of writing is very accessible. It kind of reminds me of the radio show that Bob Dylan did a few years ago in which he placed lines of poetry and music with his thoughts.
I had a discussion with a philosopher who had done an article on Lewis Caroll, prompting me to inform him that Carroll or Dodgeson was a pedophile. This led me to make some art , just a rough sketch at first showing my modern day author trawling the internet for lonely young girls. I wanted to link the rumours about him with a modern context.
So i began to research Carroll really by typing 'Was Lewis Carroll a pedophile?' in to google , i thought there must be some academic research of some kind about this. I know there have been a few films and plays on this subject.
The most famous being 'Dreamchild' which actively suggested his interest in Alice was more than just a father daughter type friendship.
Well i came across this flikr account which had a few pics of alice as take by Carroll. We know that Carroll took thousands of photographs, a fair hundred of which were of young children in states of undress. Defenders of the Alice in Wonderland author say that this is simply 'The cult of the child' which was a victorian fascination with purity and innocence which tied in to gettng back to nature cults.
Anyway, the owner of the account said he had done some investigation in Carrolls background so i followed his link.
Which took me to his quite respectable looking blog. He left another link on his blog to a site he said
called Carroll one of Englands most famous pedophiles.So i followed that link hoping for some kind of academic evidence, letters or something (We know the Through The Looking Glass authors family destroyed most of his letters and photographs after his death- by that time he was very famous).
glgarden.org...sounds normal right? The org suggested to me it was some kind of charity or a free knowledge site, maybe some kind of forum in which people can post book titles, links on the topic i wanted more info on.
Yup, gl-garden stands for 'girl love garden'. It is similar one assumes to NAMBLA or north american boy love association. In other words, it is a website devoted to the training of pedophiles.
The propoganda on their 'mission statement' immediately stopped me looking any further. I actually felt sick, because i was not expecting to encounter this.
The mission statement which i will paraphrase states they are believe abusing young girls is giving the girls democratic rights to engage in relationships with peverted older men.
I never went farther than the front page, but its a pedophiles 'how to'.
It was disturbing to say the least to go from flikr to a wordpress blog to a website devoted to pedophiles, albeit one set up with some skill at camouflage.
I have addressed the issue of pedophiles and their actions online on my blog.
Detailing their attempts to use Youtube to manipulate children.
http://sundersartwork.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/great-foot-dare-game.html
To their use of mainstream sales websites to sell de facto child porn in the form of lolita cosplay films.
http://sundersartwork.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/amazon-sells-child-porn.html
Whatever your views on the mental illness of pedophiles it appears they are using the internet in a variety of ways, covert and overt and the best defence, is as ever, education.
I had to clean a studio space for my final show, as usual Jon and money are not a good combination. So i bought way too much stuff, you could clean the Titanic with everything i got. Yes, that is the house i am renting, and yes it is chintz city. Yes we have 'letters for us' and 'letters for the landlord' baskets. One day i will write about this house, but you might not believe it.
This the mess i had to clean up, it was everything all the second years left, it was so messy a pig would not live there, a rat would rather move, a card board box is a step up. What i am saying is, it was a mess.
The second years left all this art work laying around, which normally means it is for the bin, but since im a nice person i picked it all up and stacked it in the other room. You never know, there could be a modern picasso amongst all that crap.Yes that is oatmeal.
I got paint to paint all this as you can see this is Sunderlands answer to Banksy, does your inner art critic begin to rage?
This was the blue tack wall, or as i named it, 'ow my hand aches from pulling it all off'. Seriously a teenage boy and a subscription to a porn website would have less aching in his hand than was in mine.
This was the room where i stored all the art of the 'artists' who left there work for me to clean and move. I fancied being a curator once, but from all the heavy lifting i don't know...
Anyway im pleased with myself that i got it all done, even though my forearms look like popeye now from sweeping, hanging wallpaper and lifting paintings.
Schultz explored lots of different philosophical ideas in his Peanuts strip. Even bringing in a psychoanalysis/lemonade stall for the characters to discuss their fears. In my version Brown is now an adult, he has given up on the 'football of life' and is finding therapy in beer and drugs.
Schulz wrote of laying awake at night and asking the universe 'why me ?' and he said a voice whispered back ' I dunno', your name just came up is all'.
Because the last post was a bit grim i wanted to have some fun and i came accross this bizarre website in which owners of dogs, who love their dogs can pay for their dog hair to be made in to clothes.
How ?...what?... i mean... ok Jon, explain more because my brain is gonna' explode here.
You shave your dog,
don't use Telly Savalas option or your dog will end up looking like Kojak.
''Who loves ya' baby?''
''NOOOOO, RUNNN''.
or comb him very well and then send the hair to the website, and they clean it, card it, then use a process to turn it in to wool . And then...they make a coat so you can be closer to your dog.
'Which one do i stick the Rosette on?''.
The customer looks happy, but now if it rains. Someone will always ask 'Why does it smell like wet dog in here?'
''Dont cut my hair off again Mum''
''woofly (lovely) coat''.
''That is mine, take it off''.
Hope you found it funny, it made me smile. The website is in German but it is safe and Chrome translated for me.
Meet TheRandomiszer666 who is most certainly not ten years old, he is a pedophile.It comes as no surprise that where children are pedophiles will follow. And youtube has a lot of children who have unrestricted, non parented accounts.
What the pedophile does is they pretend to be a child themselves, easier to gain trust, their not so stupid as to ask for webcam chats or engage in sexual messages since this can lead to them being prosecuted. Instead they can get the children themselves to make videos for them, tailored for their own purposes, in the form of 'dares'/
Did dare videos exist before the pedos?. It is a moot point, the children make a video asking for dares from their audience. So how does the adult make capital from this?. Well as we can see from Randomizer they ask for thumb sucking videos or foot dares.A foot dare is when the adult asks the child to show their feet in close up. There is also tongue dares and belly button dares.
The adults are very good at adopting the lingua franca of the young person ' your ridiculously...blah blah' Or using text emoticons =), =D.
In this case ramdomizer operates on the scorched earth policy of making as much dares as he can to maximise high yield.
So what is the solution?. As ever alarmist emotion solves nothing and defeats logic. Critical thinking dictates that education in a form the children can understand is the best path forward. As we can see the children got wise on their own. I have seen children making warning videos to other children telling them not to accept dares from accounts or freind them.
It really is up to the parents to be more involved in what their children are doing on the internet and educate them so they can have fun online and keep in contact as a monitoring presence.
But i know that often does not happen.
Much like online bullying the intervention happens too late.
Youtube is very slow to react to anything, since it has millions of users. I have complained about pedophile accounts i have come accross but as this pedophile told me, their not actually doing anything illegal. They have circumvented the law.
I initially found out about foot dares from a subscriber of mine, i was commenting on their art work when i noticed a comment asking them for dares. And so began my cursory investigation.
'The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and vice versa ' Donald Rumsfeld 2002.
I am interested in conspiracy theories and how they require very little in the way of actual evidence, it almost acts like faith. The murky and corrupt nature of our leaders rarely gets the same level of our scrutiny as does the Zapruder footage of a man being shot in the head by a crazed loner. Of course crazed loners do not murder famous people...or is that what they want you to think?.
Conspiracy is big business as is disaster, the 9/11 market is millions of dollars, as thousands of people share their take on the terrorist attack...for a small fee of course. The footage of JFK being shot in the head is shocking, but of course we can all watch it, rewind it, make him live , make him die.
Shock and awe is ironic, since it is not, for us, the viewer shocking at all. How many Americans and British citizens even broke their sleep cycle to watch Cluster bombs rain down on the 65 thousand Iraqi citizens who died from indiscriminate bombing?.
Im interested in how the leaders paraphrase and select information as much as the conspiracy theorists do, and are often just as out of touch with reality.
Anyone who watched 'My kid could paint that' in 2007 was intrigued by the story of four year old abstract painter Marla Olmstead whose colourful paintings sold for extravagent prices. Hailed as a child prodigy, she soon attracted the attentions of the press who questioned the claims of her father Mark that she painted them unassisted.
This is Marla painting, she is a gorgeous child and is great fun to watch lay paint down, you can see, left to her own devices she paints like a four year old would. Tactile and engaging with the paint as a material like clay she just enjoys the play.
A documentary crew was allowed to follow the family for a year, which proved controversial with the father caught in a series of fibs. At first saying her had no knowledge of art, while on the dvd extras boasting of being an artist of some merit as a young man. He was also spotted by the camera coaching his daughter and grinning when an art critic said the paintings showed masterful talent.
Just who was painting these abstracts?.
. Asked to paint on camera by the producer, Mark sets up a canvas for his daughter, who wastes no time making a giant mud pie on it. Then saying to him ' you finish this daddy' and ' you help like before'.
Marla herself seems very happy and one can tell the parents love her very much and she seems to enjoy making art.But with the paintings selling for thousands of dollars, is dishonesty important?.
Do the buyers purchase less so the art, but the story, and if they get something out of the work does it matter that the father painted, or touched up his daughters work?.
Her work still sells, though less than before, after the expose.
Brief interview with the producer , director of the doc.
Here is a 2009 video i found of Maria Olmstead she would be 9 here. And as we can see this wonderful little girl having fun with paint is not showing any sophistication of idea, palette or design. I leave it up to the visitor to decide if she painted the ones shown in the documentary.
On a side note since she is 13 now (d.o.b 2000) i wonder if she will be as interested in being in front of the cameras, according to her website 'her' paintings still sell to the gullible, or not, depending on your view.
She looks like this now, she is still making art. (edit-14/6/13)
I thought it might be interesting to juxtopose four paintings associated with Marla, the first two were made by her during the filming of the documentary when she was 3 years old and the other two were made 'off camera'.
And now the two attributed to her, but made off camera.
Notes on the child prodigy.
Critic Clement Greenberg had this to say on the issue of child prodigies in the area of painting/drawing and sculpture-what we refer to as 'art', though cultural output is art, so technically musicians, writers themselves are artists. But...onward to the quote. "In visual arts, prodigies don't count. In music and literature, yes, but not in art''.
Greenberg meant that the work prodigies display in painting and drawing, while outstanding
considering their age, lose their status as the creator gets older. Whereas writing produced at a young age by prodigies in literature(Rimbaud) and music (Mozart) hold their own, when placed alongside work produced by mature recognised masters. Interesting to note Mozart and Baudelaire died young .
Symphony number1 -written when Mozart was 8 years old.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/242790 Link to the full poem written when Rimbaud was 17.
The Drunken Boat is a very famous symbolist poem and established Rimbaud as a boy genius.
Below i will list two 'prodigies' in painting, whose work has brought them fame and money at a very young age. While looking at their work, ask if the art would be astonishing, rather than just 'talented' if it were produced by a twenty five year old. Think of it in comparison to adults artists (living or dead) who we consider to have achieved the pinnacle in their fields, how does the prodigy art stand in comparison.
I'm not asking you to think how their work will improve in ten years, but how their work now, as a prodigy, stands in comparison.
First is Russian American girl Akiane, she has appeared on Oprah Winfrey and numerous other television shows, her works sell for thousand of dollars and she represents herself as a prodigy (or her parents do).
Next is English schoolboy Kieron Williamson, who specialises in watercolour. He is hailed and sold as a prodigy. He has appeared on many t.v shows and many newspaper articles as a prodigy.
Marla herself is sold as a prodigy, regardless of who painted her work, does it stand in comparison to recognised masters of abstract art?
If Marla were in her twenties, how would her work stand up?
(i shall keep adding to this post , since it seems to be popular, perhaps i can get an interview with her for this blog, would anyone be interested if i contacted her ?)
Please leave your comments, thoughts and opinions. This is my most popular post and its fantastic to see so many people have opinions on this topic. Thanks for viewing and commenting.
