Monday, March 20, 2006

Culiblog

I'm not sure how to describe this blog post I found via the blogher roll but it's incredibly thought-provoking.
Culiblog writes, In January 2004, Dutch artist Renzo Martens produced his forty-four minute art film, Episode 1, a documentation of an extensive art performance. Martens travelled to the hottest hot spot war that he could find at the time of making the film (Chechnya, 2002), and in this 'setting' he pointed the camera, not at the war's victims and/or perpetrators like most (news) cameras do, but back upon himself. In Episode 1, Martens asks his Chechen and Russian Federation subjects, 'What do you think about me?'

And ends with: Of course Martens created this film for an art context, and the film articulately addresses contemporary art issues. Quite possibly Martens would be appalled that I consider his film to be 'useful', not just for artists and an art public, but as a tool to talk about the causes of war, hunger and the politics of emergency food distribution. And the question that Martens dares to ask amidst flying bullets, UN press conferences, annoyed Russian soldiers, women in food queues and refugees living in tent camps, the initial struggle that it initiates in the interviewee and in me, the audience, as I am simultaneously embarrassed by this question, but know that it is a question that can air-lift all of us actors out of the immediate and into a larger, more important discussion. Complexity is not complicated.

Culiblog is a culinary weblog by Debra Solomon, an artist and designer based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The blog focusses on food, food design and innovation ...

4 comments:

Sal DeTraglia said...

I'm sorry, but I just can't take this seriously. "Culi" is the words that parents used for "ass" when we were kids.

"If you don't get back to bed, you're gonna get a spanking in the culi!"

Di Mackey said...

On the 'culi'?

Hmmm, maybe my parents never used it because they never needed to spank me?

Lol anyway if, and I say IF, then they might have said 'bum' in my world.

Sal DeTraglia said...

"Bum!" That's so...British.

Anyway...the Italian (and Spanish) slang for "ass" is "culo." "Little ass" is "culito" (in Spanish, at least). "Culito" has way, WAY too many syllables...so "culi" it is.

It should come as no surprise that "culi" has already been internalized by my daughter (although no...she has never been spanked...nor will she).

And on that note, I'm gonna take my culi to bed.

Buenas noches, L-Di.
Sal

Di Mackey said...

Ahhh, all is clear now.

Bum is so British but NZers were mostly influenced by the Brits when I was a kid. I must have heard other kids parents shouting it ...