Author: DC (Page 340 of 1086)

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Fiona Banner 1066, 2010
‘The default take on Fiona Banner’s work is that it’s “about” language. Given that she has made punctuation marks into glowing neons and weighty bronzes, has handwritten start-to-finish running commentaries on Hollywood blockbusters, sexually explicit films and the bodies of life models, and fashioned an ersatz alphabet from fragmented images of fighter planes, that’s not an entirely unwarranted assessment. It is, however, a partial one, obscuring the poetics and acuity of the Merseyside-born artist’s practice, whose insights arise between laterally connected points of reference. Words and how they fail us, yes, but also war, pornography and the vulnerable human body. Banner has suggested that she began making art from war films because she loved them; because she wanted to figure out why they gripped her – how they could be at once seductive and repulsive; how we could hate war, but relish these movies. The earliest war film she found fascinating was Top Gun; in 2004 she made a word-portrait of Black Hawk Down. As for 1066, it does have a beautiful aspect which is the way that one description of what is going – an arrow in the eye, a soldier felled – overlays another, words running in opposite directions evoking the headlong vectors of the tapestry; and the idea that there always two sides to each story of war.’

 

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Jason Rhoades Twelve-Wheel Waggon Wheel Chandelier, 2004
12 wheels, acrylic glass, cables, 48 neon phrases, fishing line, polystyrene, hot glue, carpet, various materials.

 

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Micah Lexier & Derek McCormack I am the Coin (2010)
‘I AM THE COIN WAS A YEAR-LONG INSTALLATION CONSISTING OF THOUSANDS OF COINS MOUNTED DIRECTLY ON ONE WALL OF THE BMO PROJECT ROOM IN 2010.. EACH CUSTOM-MINTED COIN IS IMPRINTED WITH A SINGLE LETTER OF THE ALPHABET. WHAT AT FIRST APPEARS TO BE A RANDOM GRID OF LETTERS REVEALS ITSELF, UPON CLOSER INSPECTION, TO BE A SERIES OF WORDS AND SENTENCES UNINTERRUPTED BY SPACES OR PUNCTUATION MARKS. THE WORDS AND SENTENCES COMBINE TO TELL A STORY THAT WAS WRITTEN SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS PROJECT BY TORONTO WRITER DEREK MCCORMACK. THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE GRID SPELLS OUT THE STORY, WHICH CAN BE READ LIKE A BOOK, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT; THE TOP HALF OF THE GRID IS A MIRROR IMAGE OF THE BOTTOM. THE STORY IS ALL ABOUT COINS, THE INSTALLATION ITSELF, AND THE PEOPLE BEHIND IT.

‘THIS COMPLEX TALE IS NARRATED BY ONE OF THE COINS ON THE WALL, A SLIGHTLY MISCHIEVOUS COIN WITH A TASTE FOR PUNS, PUZZLES, CRYPTIC CONSTRAINTS, AS WELL AS ANECDOTES ABOUT REAL PEOPLE. BUT BE WARNED, THE ANECDOTES ARE NOT NECESSARILY TRUE.

‘A CLUE CONCEALED WITHIN THE STORY REVEALS THE LOCATION OF THE NARRATOR. THE FIRST ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE TO FIND THE CLUE AND IDENTIFY THE NARRATOR ON THIS WEBSITE WILL BE AWARDED A SPECIAL PRIZE.’

 

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Christopher Wool Untitled, 1990
‘This work is part of a series of language-based black-and-white “word paintings” Wool began making in the late 1980s. In an effort to impose limits on his abstract compositions, he tied them to phrases of his own invention or borrowed from other, often popular sources. The lines “The cat’s in the bag. The bag’s in the river” come from the 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, written by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, where it serves as film-noir code to convey the successful execution of a scheme to bring about the downfall of one of the characters.’

 

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Matt Mullican Untitled (Learning from That Person’s Work: Room 1), 2005
‘Since the 1970s Mullican has been experimenting with hypnosis to create art that both examines his subconscious, and functions as a strategy for breaking from the patterns of everyday life. Working under these hypnotically induced intoxications or psychoses, Mullican becomes his alter ego, what he refers to as that person—an ageless, genderless being that inhabits his physical body. That person’s reality is documented through a series of performances wherein he draws, counts, and writes with ink on large sheets of easel paper (as seen in the video below). The finished drawings are attached to queen-sized bed sheets in a grid-like pattern, and hung through a maze of installation rooms that acts as a diagram of that person’s reality (or, arguably, of Mullican’s subconscious).’

 

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Yi Xin Tong Fishermen’s Words, 2018
‘Gravesend-based Yi Xin Tong identifies as an artist first and as a fisherman second. But it’s a close second.’

 

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Edward Ruscha Pay Nothing Until April, 2003
‘In Pay or Pay Nothing Until April, Ruscha has used a mountain landscape and an advertising slogan painted in a clean modern font. Ruscha lives in Los Angeles and the city and its film industry is important in his work. The mountains he uses in his works have the spectacular and slightly unreal look of a film backdrop. By mixing awe-inspiring natural imagery with banal, consumerist text without any clear style, Ruscha’s painting reflects the city in which he lives, a place he once referred to as ‘the ultimate cardboard cut-out town’.’

 

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Richard Prince Joke Paintings, 1992 – 1999
‘Beginning in 1984, Richard Prince began assembling one-line gag cartoons and ‘borscht belt’ jokes from the 1950s which he redrew onto small pieces of paper. ‘Artists were casting sculptures in bronze, making huge paintings, talking about prices and clothes and cars and spending vast amounts of money. So I wrote jokes on little pieces of paper and sold them for $10 each’. Following the hand-written jokes and subsequent works in which cartoon images were silkscreened onto canvas, in 1987 Prince adopted a more radical, formulaic strategy of mechanically reproducing classic one liners and gags onto a flat monochrome canvas.’

 

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Ray Johnson Rejected cover design for Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, 1957
‘Ray founded the New York Correspondence School with the first mailings being sent as far back as 1958. Ray was the center and primary proponent of the ‘school,’ mailing mimeographed letters, drawings (often of bunnies), instructions and collage. Text-wise, the work offered 4 primary challenges to the traditional studio/gallery/viewer formulation: Subverted the notion of high or low brow by simply ignoring the world in which those notions held sway. Changed the traditional artist-viewer relationship, offering original work to be viewed expressly in the home in what amounted to a 1:1 setting. Moved past the question as to whether or not language could be trusted. Johnson rendered it moot by mailing the work. If the Post Office could be trusted to deliver the work to the address on the envelope, how could you not ‘trust’ the work inside to be faithful to the same basic notions of language? It could not be reviewed…’

 

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William Burroughs Untitled, 1959
‘It’s a literary technique, but crazy influential as certain folks began to reconsider (again) how we understand the basics of our written language, looking instead to break down structural assumptions in order to find hidden meaning or, according to Burroughs, with potential for divining the future.’

 

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Carey Young Declared Void, 2005
Vinyl drawing and text, dimensions variable

 

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Carl Andre Untitled, 1963
Typed carbon paper transfer on paper

 

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John Waters Various, 1991 – 2006
‘You could just ask yourself, as Waters does in the essay “Roommates” in his 2010 book Role Models, “Isn’t art supposed to transpose even the most banal detail of our lives?”’

 

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Ben Anderson DFYVVM, 2017
Acrylic on faux marble

 

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Ad Reinhardt How to Look at …, 1946
‘These cartoons, neatly conjoining reproduced and hand-drawn line, pedagogically engage with exactly the problems Reinhardt was working out elsewhere and earlier on the sketchbook page and in actual lines of charcoal, ink, gouache, and glued paper. At the same time, they evince the artist’s impulse to both mine and undermine the burgeoning power of New York’s art institutions. (The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931, and the Museum of Non-objective Painting—now the Guggenheim—in 1939.) The cartoons’ conflation of line and lineage, “actual activity” and critical engagement of institution and context, mirrors the artist’s multifaceted praxis as a whole. Reinhardt was keenly aware of what was and was not on view “about town”; he not only reviewed shows for publications including New Masses and PM but picketed museums and wrote pamphlets and letters to the editor about exhibition policies.’

 

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Larry Johnson Various, 1982 – 1991
‘Johnson’s art is highly formalized. Although he almost always uses photography, he does not consider himself a photographer. He follows a tradition of conceptual photography in which artists use photography for purposes other than capturing a decisive moment. Johnson works with text and images in various combinations invoking the parallel worlds of design and American popular culture.’

Untitled (A Quiet Life), 1990

Untitled (Movie Stars on Clouds), 1982/84

Untitled (Classically Tragic Story), 1991

Untitled (I Hated that About You), 1987

Untitled (Ghost Story for Courtney Love), 1992

 

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Goran Trbuljak old and bald I search for a gallery, 1982
‘The New Art Practice in the 1970s were mostly going on outside exhibition spaces, in galleries that were part of the student cultural centers, but occasionally also in certain state galleries which presented in their programs the local and international avant-garde scene, like the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. In 1971, in the gallery of the Student Cultural Centre in Zagreb, Trbuljak exposed only a poster on which it was written, “I do not want to show anything new and original”.’

 

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Marcel Broodthaers L’Art et les mots, 1973
‘Although they may seem arbitrary, everything in those paintings has been carefully studied, from the typography to the kind of printing. The elegance and style of the typography frequently connote the tradition of high culture and its concern with execution and expression. He combines them in his literary paintings with an industrial element, mechanical reproduction, and they are his ironic response to the successive fashions of minimalism and conceptual art, while opening the way for a kind of visual expression which, without necessarily being poetry or painting, is both at the same time. They take to extremes the peintures-poèmes of Joan Miró and, most of all, the work of René Magritte (another Belgian, who had a deep influence on him).’

 

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Kay Rosen Various, 1991 – 2021
‘Kay Rosen is a master of the text-based art medium. She’s figured out how to meld the visual and the verbal into an ideal gallery experience. Using only words in block letters, her work is easy to read, yet beautiful to look at, delivering a mental punch that resonates long after her language is consumed. Specific enough to deliver a message, yet at the same time open enough to invite multiple interpretations. Rosen’s practice is masterfully tuned into the desire of the art viewer.’

 

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Shirin Neshat Zahra, 2008
C-print and ink

 

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John McQueen Bird Brain, 2002
‘On close inspection, the names of various birds are legible.’

 

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Camilio Rojas Flavor, 2011
‘This piece was created using over 3,400 cigarettes that spell the word flavor. The cigarettes are half smoked showing the nicotine in them.’

 

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Christopher Knowles Typings, 1981 – 1996
‘For a person with autism, like the artist Christopher Knowles, the world outside can be so noisy, so busy, so full of information that it becomes overwhelming and, sometimes, terrifying. Knowles’s response to the frenzied world around him is to construct islands of visual and auditory play in its midst. In his art—spanning text, sound, painting, sculpture, and performance—concrete facts, numbers, and patterns are basic elements that not only ground him in the world, but are a source of delight. His work can be disconcerting and strange, but is so imbued with Knowles’s ebullient energy that it’s always enchanting—and fun.’

 

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Rhys Ziemba Frank Zappa Quotation, 2008
Acrylic and vinyl lettering on found artwork

 

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Tom Phillips Humument Fragment, 2005
‘In 1966, at age twenty-nine, Tom Phillips began his Humument project, the “treatment” of the 1892 novel A Human Document, by the Victorian author William Hurrell Mallock. The first artist’s book that resulted was initially published in 1973 and has now gone through five editions; Phillips began a second version in 1980 and continues to work on it to this day. To create these treatments, the artist removed each page from Mallock’s novel and subjected it to playful editing, surgically removing blocks of text to form an Apollinaire-like shaped poem—or, rather, a Mallarmé-like throw of the verbal dice. Sometimes Phillips’s treated pages borrow from pop-culture imagery, sometimes old photographs are used, and sometimes figures are painted on the page. Each page has been worked and reworked, yet it all looks random and informal, as though Phillips had a divining rod that suddenly found the “right words” or else had been spooked by some hidden, subliminal meaning. In either case, a kind of alchemical distillation has taken place, with the lead of Mallock’s heavy prose quintessentialized into lyrical golden drops.’

 

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Jenny Holzer Various, 1989 – 2020
‘Since the 1970s, Jenny Holzer has inserted language into public settings as part of her singular conceptual practice. Her installations—which have taken the form of billboards, projections, park benches, condom wrappers, and electronic signs—feature texts which range from enigmatic, koan-like phrases such as “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” to longer, more involved screeds.’

 

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Richard Hamilton Swingeing London 67, 1968
‘Hamilton’s art dealer, Robert Fraser, and members of the rock group the Rolling Stones were arrested in 1967 by the London police for drug possession. The following year, Hamilton published several prints about the press coverage of the events. Swingeing London 67 is an assemblage of clippings compiled by Fraser’s gallery and laid out to mimic the composition of a page of newsprint. He selected headlines that focused on trivial details, such as the men’s meals, cars, and clothing, rather than on the court proceedings and sentences. Pieces of wrapping paper from an incense packet that appear between the cuttings reference the incense sticks that authorities encountered during 
their raid and alleged were meant to disguise the smell of cannabis.’

 

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Betty Tompkins Various, 2018
‘The artist has literally ripped out the pages of the art-historical canon, altering its images with very contemporary language about women, power, and guilt.’

 

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Zhang Dali Slogan No. 6,’Strengthen the construction of moral thought’, 2007
‘Zhang uses a particular technique of text and image juxtaposition to engage with the civic political slogans that were plastered on the streets of Beijing on the eve of the 2008 Olympic Games.’

 

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Bruce Nauman Eat Death, 1972
Yellow (Eat) glass tubing superimposed on blue (Death) tubing with glass tubing suspension frame

 

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Roni Horn Dickinson Stayed Home, 1992-1993
‘Emily Dickinson is a pivotal figure for Roni Horn, while also a figure of empathy. Born in 1830 in New England, Dickinson wrote some 1800 poems. But she preferred not to publish them, lived as a recluse in her bedroom, and restricted her social life to her Homestead. Her involvement with the world occurred through the books in her father’s library and her abundant correspondence. American feminist criticism, which blossomed in the early 1990s, returned to the question of Dickinson’s poetry and the normative image of her as a “recluse”, reassessing her chosen solitude as a requirement for her creativity and the fundamental condition for her freedom. Roni Horn, who takes the stand of being “before gender”, “neutralises” Dickinson. As a figure with whom Horn identifies, the poet and her poetry are an integral part of Horn’s quest for a centre.’

 

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Dan Graham Rock My Religion, 1982-84
‘Rock My Religion is a thesis on the relation between religion and rock music in contemporary culture. Graham formulates a history that begins with the Shakers, an early religious community who practiced self-denial and ecstatic trance dances. With the “reeling and rocking” of religious revivals as his point of departure, Graham analyzes the emergence of rock music as religion with the teenage consumer in the isolated suburban milieu of the 1950s, locating rock’s sexual and ideological context in post-World War II America. The music and philosophies of Patti Smith, who made explicit the trope that rock is religion, are his focus. This complex collage of text, film footage and performance forms a compelling theoretical essay on the ideological codes and historical contexts that inform the cultural phenomenon of rock `n’ roll music.’

 

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John Baldessari Various, 1966 – 1968
‘In the late 1960s Baldessari neglected painting and started to use words as a compositional element as images. ‘A word can’t substitute for an image, but is equal to it’, explained the artist in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist and stated further: ‘You can build with words just like you can build with imagery.’ He began to create artworks with pure painted text on canvas and emulsions of photo and text. From 1966 to 1968 Baldessari produced a series of text-paintings consisting of statements about art and its concept. He displayed quotations from known art critics and used formulaic instructions or definitions and comments from art manuals. Thereby the artist transformed the influence of art theory and critics on artworks to the motif of his conceptual text-paintings.[5] As an artist of the conceptual art movement Baldessari’s aim was to produce art without using the conventional art praxis.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Guess what, our temperature starts climbing into the gross realm again starting tomorrow. One last (hopefully) sweat pot of a Paris. Yeah, the casting part of making a film is maybe the most exciting, certainly the most important. Maybe especially to a fiction writer like me since my fictional characters never grow surfaces (and I like it that way). Happily slightly belated birthday to Anita! Ha ha, that’s some mom love has there. Explains a lot. Love realising that what we call syntax is what words themselves call an orgy, G. ** David Ehrenstein, I don’t know ‘La Chair de l’Orchidée’, but soon I will. ** Travis (fka Cal), Hi! Oh, no, I’m sorry you had to go through the Covid ordeal. Ah, you are Cal or, rather, were ‘Cal’. Travis certainly works. Two syllables, strong on the first one, nice vowel sound combination. I’m hoping and trusting that your feeling of defeat is some last bit of mindfucking exhaust from your Covid bout. Your talent has always jumped into my brain full-fledged. It’s really nice to have you back. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘ À l’intérieur’ is the Satan of scissors films. I saw on the news that Leeds won yesterday. Assuming that’s a plus in your world, congrats. ** Russ Healy, Oh, man, is there stuff you can or do take to make the arthritis take long naps? Thank you very much about ‘I Wished’. Yeah, I’m a big sentence fetishist. When I’m writing I think about the sentences more than anything else, I think. And when I read, same deal. And when I read a writer whose sentences seem too amazing to have even been possible — Foster-Wallace and Lutz being great examples — it’s like nerd LSD. And thank about ‘PGL’. Zac and Are super exciting and jonesing to make the new one. Have best day humanly possible. ** trees, Ted! Old buddy! Mega-maestro! You know, I’ve never seen ‘Exorcist 3’, and clearly that’s a gaping gap. That I will plug with it as soon as I find ‘E3’. Which shouldn’t be too hard? I’m well, and you? Love from Paris meeting and greeting your Philly love midair. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Well, we’re looking at initial audition tapes now. When we get to LA, we’ll meet in person with the most promising folks and have them do a little line reading but mostly just hang out and talk with them casually and observe them. Theoretically we’re open to pretty much anyone with any background or lack thereof. The first person we cast for ‘Room Temperature’ about six months ago is a young French guy who starred in a Michel Gondry film when he was 14, but he’s against conventional acting. So he has experience being filmed, which is very helpful, but has no acting tics we’ll have to erode. There are three people who we’re seriously interested interested in right now, and two of them are visual artists, and one of them is a 12 year old boy with no acting experience. So anything is possible. Mm, hm, I don’t remember where that list came from. I must have done a general google search re: films/scissors and ended up seeing a link. The Chills! You keep listening to bands I haven’t thought about in ages and would like to think about (and hear) again. I hate those delays. I managed to sneak into Criterion Channel over here through a VPN, but the connection is so sluggish for some reason that it’s almost useless. ** Misanthrope, Howdy, G! Up? This and that and the other thing, thanks. Argh about the impending extra work. How do you prepare for that, or will just leap into it blind? ** Robert, Hi! Oh, thanks a lot. Sounds nice. I live about two blocks from the Tuileries-Concorde-Champs Elysee corridor where the supersonic jets do their flyover on Bastille Day. I cant see them from my window, other than their reflection in a neighbor’s window, but the sound is immense and borderline apocalyptic earthquake-like. I think you’d like it. I hope your week has begun inimitably. ** Right. You get artistically employed wordage today. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Researchers into the history of scissors generally agree that scissors were invented in Egypt around 1500 B.C.E. and were first fashioned of bronze, spreading slowly through the rest of the ancient world through trade and exploration. These early scissors were, as best archeologists can determine, made of a single piece of metal. They were mechanically two levers joined by a loop which served as a fulcrum.

 

 

‘Each sharpened level was a scissor, and the pair was called, scissors. On about 100 A.D. Roman craftsmen developed cross-blade scissors. That is, the blade-edges crossed and slid past each other when cutting. The looping fulcrum remained. Even now, gardening catalogs in the U.S. and Britain offer grass-edging shears that demonstrated the cross-blade principle. Like the Roman model, these scissors rested in an open position after use.

 

 

‘As is the case with so many early tools, the question of modification and innovation remains in the dark. At some point, someone clearly realized that greater control with less hand strength could be obtained by separating the scissors into two pieces anchoring them with a screw or rivet and making loops for fingers.

 

 

‘Looking at old scissors suggests that for a number of centuries, depending on the country of origin, both designs coexisted with craftsmen and purchasers deciding which design served specific purposes: cutting grapevines, thin sheets of metal, paper, thread and cloth. The final step in creating modern scissors is documented. In London in 1761 Robert Hinchcliffe developed the method for steel-casting scissors. What he produced took the form we recognize today.

 

 

‘Early scissors, were, of course, sharpened. To denote and protect their sharpness, scissors were often encased in a leather cover, similar to the sheath for a knife. Like knives, over the years in many cultures scissors became the focus of folk superstitions, some of which exist in less fearful form today. The first is that scissors, like a knife, should never be given as a gift. Doing that will cut the relationship between giver and recipient. The usual evasion of the dangerous qualities of this gift was the playful purchase of the knife or scissors, and the amount was small ranging from an English half-penny to a shiny U.S. dime or quarter. To this day, those giving a gift of cutlery often tape a penny to the package in case the recipient does not know that sharp gifts must be bought.

 

 

‘In some cultures the cutting qualities of knives or scissors meant that they were not passed hand to hand but rather set down for a friend to pick up thus preserving the friendship. Old wives said that cutting worked more than one way: a pair of scissors placed under the pillow of a woman in labor or a person with a painful injury would cut the pain in half. And, whether given in a case or not, scissors were sometimes hung by one handle on a hook beside or over the door, their open position forming a crude cross and their exposed sharp blades threatening damage to any evil influences attempting to enter the house.

 

 

‘Clearly the history of scissors would not be the best choice for a factual sixth-grade report. As with many inventions, modifications and improvements on an original idea came, like the idea itself, from obscure people who were too busy working to realize they were becoming a part of history. There’s a certain pleasure in this obscurity. The history of scissors is the history of ordinary people making their way through the world and solving problems, very much the way we do.’ — Janet Beal, Info Guru

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Game piece

 

‘Throughout Japanese history there are frequent references to “sansukumi-ken” (三竦み拳), meaning “ken” (拳) [fist] games with a three-way [三] (san) deadlock [竦み] (sukumi), in the sense that A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. The games originated in China before being imported to Japan and subsequently becoming popular.

 

 

‘The earliest Japanese “sansukumi-ken” game was known as “mushi-ken” (虫拳), which was imported directly from China. In “Mushi-ken” the “frog” (represented by the thumb) is superseded by the “slug” (represented by the little finger), which, in turn is superseded by the “snake” (represented by the index finger), which is superseded by the “frog”. Although this game was imported from China the Japanese version differs in the animals represented. In adopting the game, the original Chinese characters for the poisonous centipede (蜈蜙) were apparently confused with the characters for the “slug” (蛞蝓). The most popular sansukumi-ken game in Japan was kitsune-ken (狐拳). In the game, a supernatural fox called a kitsune (狐) defeats the village head, the village head (庄屋) defeats the hunter, and the hunter (猟師) defeats the fox. Kitsune-ken, unlike mushi-ken or rock–paper–scissors, is played by making gestures with both hands.

 

 

‘Kitsune-ken was a popular Japanese rock–paper–scissors variant. From left to right: The hunter (ryōshi), village head (shōya) and fox (kitsune). Today, the best-known “sansukumi-ken” is called “jan-ken”, which is a variation of the Chinese games introduced in the 17th century. “Jan-ken” uses the rock, paper, and scissors signs and is the game that the modern version of rock–paper–scissors derives from directly. Hand-games using gestures to represent the three conflicting elements of rock, paper, and scissors have been most common since the modern version of the game was created in the late 19th century, between the Edo and Meiji periods.

 

 

‘By the early 20th century, rock–paper–scissors had spread beyond Asia, especially through increased Japanese contact with the west. Its English-language name is therefore taken from a translation of the names of the three Japanese hand-gestures for rock, paper and scissors: elsewhere in Asia the open-palm gesture represents “cloth” rather than “paper”. The shape of the scissors is also adopted from the Japanese style.

 

 

‘The Paper Scissors Stone Club was founded in London, England in 1842. The charter appeared in Edition 1, Volume 1, of the club’s publication, The Stone Scissors Paper. It read,”The club is dedicated to the exploration and dissemination of knowledge regarding the game of Paper Scissors Stone and providing a safe legal environment for the playing of said game.” In 1918, the club’s name was changed to World RPS Club. Soon after that, the club moved its headquarters to Toronto, Canada. In 1925, the club had more than 10,000 active members, changed its name the World RPS Society, and hosted its first annual championship.

 

 

‘In Britain in 1924 it was described in a letter to a newspaper as a hand game, possibly of Mediterranean origin, called “zhot”. A reader then wrote in to say that the game “zhot” referred to was evidently Jan-ken-pon, which she had often seen played throughout Japan. Although at this date the game appears to have been new enough to British readers to need explaining, the appearance by 1927 of a popular thriller with the title Scissors Cut Paper, followed by Stone Blunts Scissors (1929), suggests it quickly became popular.

 

 

‘In 1927, a children’s magazine in France described it in detail, referring to it as a “jeu japonais” (“Japanese game”). Its French name, “Chi-fou-mi”, is based on the Old Japanese words for “one, two, three” (“hi, fu, mi”).

 

 

‘A New York Times article of 1932 on the Tokyo rush hour describes the rules of the game for the benefit of American readers, suggesting it was not at that time widely known in the U.S. The 1933 edition of the Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia described it as a common method of settling disputes between children in its article on Japan; the name was given as “John Kem Po” and the article pointedly asserted, “This is such a good way of deciding an argument that American boys and girls might like to practice it too.”‘ — collaged

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Injurer

An angry dad chucked a pair of scissors at his ten-year-old daughter because she would not do her homework – and the point pierced more than an inch into her brain. Surgeons had to remove a section of her skull in a risky operation lasting several hours. Amazingly, the blade did not hit any major vessels in the brain and it could be successfully removed.

 

Curtis Francis, 12, who suffers from severe learning difficulties put nail scissors into his mouth handle-first, getting them stuck in his throat. Doctors took 90 minutes to remove them under general anaesthetic and miraculously Curtis suffered only minor cuts. The youngster’s learning difficulties have left him with no sense of danger, similar to a toddler. His mum Karon Edwards, 50, first thought he had swallowed a pen lid but became worried when he began coughing up blood. The mum-of-two, who lives in Bristol with Curtis and his elder brother Shane, 15, said: ”It was absolutely horrendous.”

 

On January 20th, a man with scissors lodged in his skull calmly walked into a hospital ER and said, “I have a small problem.” This happened after a bar patron in Mexico was stabbed in the skull with a pair of scissors. Jonas Acevedo Monroy, 32, received help from his friend Nandor Altamirano Carvajal, who drove bleeding Monroy to the hospital to save his life. “Jonas was as always full of high spirits and was being charming with everyone in the bar when one of the locals took umbrage,” said Altamirano Carvajal, Mirror reported. “Jonas offered to buy the man a drink, but the guy pulled out a pair of scissors from his jacket and stabbed him in the head. What he was doing with a pair of scissors in his pocket I don’t know. It was really shocking.”

 

69-year-old Pat Skinner of Sydney, Australia had an operation in May 2001, but continued to complain of intense pain. It wasn’t until she received this x-ray 18 months later that it was discovered the surgeon had accidentally sewed her up with his surgical scissors still inside.

 

Four-year-old Chinese boy Xiao Yu was helping his parents decorate their front door for spring festival in 2010 when he fell onto the scissors he was holding. You can only imagine the horror his parents must have felt when they saw that the scissors had pierced through their young son’s face.

 

In a freak accident, 86-year-old gardener Leroy Luetscher fell face-first onto a pair of pruning shears outside his Phoenix, AZ home in July 2012. And while medical staff were no doubt relieved to discover that Luetscher had not fallen on the garden tool’s blades, an X-ray revealed the true extent of the damage: the handle had passed through the man’s eye socket, penetrating all the way down to his neck, where it rested on his carotid artery.

 

Sasha Ulyanov, 3, was playing at home with his three sisters when he ran into a wall carrying a pair of nail scissors and stabbed himself in the heart. The children’s mother was out taking lunch to their father, who was working in the field. “Sasha is our youngest child. He was running with the scissors through the kitchen door and misjudged it, and ran into the door frame with the scissors in his hand. He fell to the floor screaming, and our oldest daughter, Diana, who is 15, picked him up and rushed him next door to our neighbor,” the children’s mother, Natalia Baltsyukevich, 35, told CEN. That neighbor, Liubov Mikhalchik, is an emergency paramedic in their village of Pashkovich in Eastern Belarus Voranava District. “I realized straightaway that it was a serious injury.” Mikhalchik said. “You could see the scissors vibrating to the beating of his heart.

 

Apparently someone in China borrowed a pair of scissors to clean their teeth after a meal and swallowed them by mistake when a friend told a joke and they laughed.

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Did you know?

Where did that sc in scissors come from? We used to spell it sissors or sizars. The classicizers of the 1500s thought the word went back to Latin scindere, to split, but it actually came to us (via French) from cisorium, “cutting implement.” The same assumption turned sithe into scythe.

The largest pair of functional scissors in the world measure 2.31m (7 ft 7 in) from tip to handle. They were manufactured by Neerja Roy Chowdhury (India) and unveiled on 16 August 2009. Neerja was inspired to make the scissors after writing her own comic book which she describes as ‘unconventional’.

Scissors were used in the arenas by the gladiators of the ancient Roman Empire. The gladiators who wielded the scissors in combat were also known as scissors. Made from hardened steel, the scissors measured up to one and a half feet long. They were surprisingly light, weighing in at an easy 5-7 pounds; this allowed the scissor to be wielded with a good amount of speed. The scissors’ unique shape and design at that time made them a crowd favorite.

The Scissors is great for intimate sex How does it work? Easy to do, complicated to explain. So you lie facing each other and put your top leg over his hip. He grabs your bum and then you out your arm round his waist and push your bottom leg against his leg. The turn-ons: You’ll be rubbing your clitoral area on his groin and you get to kiss each other. The turn-offs: A little boring and pedestrian for some. It’s not visually exciting but physically it’s amazing.

It is unlucky to give someone scissors for a present, as it will “cut the ties” of your friendship.

In Romania they believe that if you drop a pair scissors on the floor, it means your boyfriend/girlfriend cheated on you.

Tired of using a rolling pizza cutter that barely cuts? You can use an ingenious new invention called the “Pizza Scissors Spatula”. This brilliant kitchen tool merges scissors and a spatula so you can cut and pick up a pizza slice all in one quick motion without burning your hands or having any toppings fall off.

If you dip the pointed end of your scissors into a container of bubble solution, you will be able to push the scissors through the wall of ta bubble without popping it. When something wet touches a bubble, it doesn’t poke a hole in the wall of the bubble, it just slides through and the bubble forms right around it.

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Namesake

Liars Scissor

Hello Kitty Suicide Club Safety Scissor Death Squad

Slipknot Scissors

SCISSOR live @ The Time Machine

At the Drive In One Armed Scissor

Led Er Est Scissors

XTC Scissor Man

Stray from the Path Scissor Hands

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Movie star

X-CROSS (2008) comes from BATTLE ROYALE 2’s Kenta Fukasaku. DEATH NOTE’s Tetsuya Oishi penned the script based off the novel by Nobuyuki Joko. Here’s the synopsis: Still stinging from a bad break-up, Shiyori heads off on a girls-only weekend with her best friend Aiko. Unfortunately, the remote hot springs resort they go to isn’t exactly as promised; the brochure didn’t mention anything about bizarre locals, blood rituals, or crazed harajuku girls brandishing frightfully large pairs of scissors. Soon, each girl is running for her life—they’re just not running from the same things.

 

List of deaths in Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet: Hit in lower jaw with hatchet, Scissors in eye, forehead hit with hatchet, Head twisted, Shot repeatedly with handguns, Double beheaded with hatchet in car, Impaled in back of neck through mouth/beheaded at jawline with scissors, Beheaded with hatchet(off-screen), body thrown through window, Scissors in head, eyes ripped out, Hit in face with hatchet, knocked into fuse box, Throat slit, Half of head cut off with pickaxe, Gutted out of back with pickaxe, Pickaxed in throat, Dragged into dark room, hacked apart with pickaxe, Hand cut off, dragged into dark room, hacked apart with pickaxe, Hit in face/groin pickaxed/4 more times, Strangled, Hit twice in head with fire hose nozzle, glass shard in arm, beheaded with hatchet.

 

À l’intérieur (2007)

 

In Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007) a disfigured woman with her mouth slit like Heath Ledger’s Joker kidnaps and kills children with big scissors.

 

Any gore-hound will remember the suicide scene in The Night of the Hunted (1980) when the woman kills herself by stabbing a pair of scissors through her eyes into the brain.

 

The Granny (1995): Great ballbusting / femdom scene where the granny pretends to be a hot young woman who wants to have sex with the guy. Then gradually she turns into the crazed granny who is holding a pair of scissors. She then cuts off his penis and says “now I’m going to cut off your big head!”

 

You want to squirm in your seat? Just watch the moment in The Dead Zone when Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) is able to detect through his psychic abilities that Deputy Dodd is a murderer. Yes, watch as Deputy Dodd is cornered and makes that fateful decision to end his own life. But not with a gun. Not with a rope or by jumping out a window either. Deputy Dodd is creative everybody! He wants to go out like no one else ever has: by slamming his head into a sharp pair or scissors of course. Now even though they don’t show the scissors actually going into his skull, it’s the sheer brilliance of the set up and then seeing the aftermath that is so effective and cringe-worthy.

 

Doghouse (2009): A group of friends take their friend Vince who is going through a divorce to a remote village of Moodley for a lads weekend but when they finally get there it turns out all the woman have turned into man hating zombie cannibals. Snipper, one of the zombie women in the town who was a hairdresser, is armed with scissors which she uses to slice and slaughter every man she sees.

 

Trailer: I will rape you with this scissors (2008)

 

The Boogey Man (1983): We are gifted with numerous stabbings, self-inflicted tracheostomy via scissors, pitchfork impalement, a twin human kebab, and even a little well-meaning child exploitation for good measure.

 

When the blood begins to spill in Red, White, & Blue (2010) every slice of a knife, every stab of the scissors, and worse will hit you in the gut.

 

Twisty’s scissors, American Horror Story: Freak Show (2014)

 

How Melancholie der Engel (2009) attains an atmosphere of depression and dread from the beginning however, is truly cheap and distasteful. Insects and animals are crushed and tortured at intervals; a small lizard is crushed to death, in another moment a snails eyes are cut off with scissors – all real. I didn’t see (excuse the pun) any reason for this to happen, considering the movie has enough fictional violence and crazy debauchery on its own. For example, an old man who joins the group early on brings a girl in a wheelchair to the “party” who is openly abused and left lying around like an object. Later they cut this old man’s skin off with scissors (also for no reason) and he’s left to crawl home with his guts hanging out. The group burn him on a bonfire, at which point another character is that excited he gets someone to masturbate him to climax in explicit close-up. In addition, the movie contains people being defecated and urinated on, both alive and dead.

 

Corpse Party: Tortured Souls (2013): A girl has a vision: she wakes up in a dark room lying on the floor and having her legs and hands tied. She finds herself lying among some children (a boy and two girls), who are tied as well. She gets her eyes tied by a man. After that, the children get themselves killed with scissors one after another. We see the boy’s tongue being cut off with scissors and thrown on the floor. Then, his body is stabbed multiple times again with scissors (not shown, but in the end of the scene we see the boy’s dead body with its entrails revealed). A little girl gets a half of her head cut off with scissors (not shown, but in the end, a part of her head is shown dropping on the floor and leaving a lot of blood). Then, a girl that has a vision, gets her eyes revealed. She finds a little girl standing in front of her with scissors in her hand. A few seconds later, we see the little girl stabbing another girl in her eye and pulling it out. A little girl is shown being tied to the table. Soon, a man that stands in front of her, stabs her in leg with scissors. Then, she gets her eye pulled out (not shown, but heard). We see her bloody eye socket and a wound on her leg later. After that, a man stabs a girl in chest with scissors (we see a blood spraying and hear a girl screaming). A boy is pierced in stomach from the back with scissors (his entrails are shown falling out of his body). Then, he gets his skull smashed graphically (we see a bloody hand sticking out of his mouth). We see a group of children (ghosts) joyfully killing other children by stabbing them with scissors in eyes, neck and head. A boy is stabbed in neck with scissors with bloody results. A boy is stabbed in eye with scissors off-screen. A man is stabbed in back with scissors. A little girl stabs a boy in hand with scissors. After that, she stabs him in stomach. A man cuts a dead girl’s tongue off with scissors. Afterwards, he stabs her in chest several times. Another scene of a man cutting a dead girl’s tongue off with scissors. It is thrown into a bucket, full of bloody tongues.

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Artists’ friend

Beili Liu The Mending Project (2011): The installation consists of hundreds of Chinese scissors suspended from the ceiling, pointing downwards. The hovering, massive cloud of scissors alludes to distant fear, looming violence and worrisome uncertainty. The performer sits beneath the countless sharp blades of the scissors, and performs an on-going simple task of mending. […] As each visitor enters the space, one is asked to cut off a piece of the white cloth hung near the entrance, and offer the cut section to the performer. She then continuously sews the cut pieces onto the previous ones. The mended fabric grows in size throughout the duration of the performance, and takes over the vast area of the floor beneath the scissors.

 

Richard Diebenkorn Scissors I (1959); Kelly Medford Scissors on the Table (2012); Lucinda Buscall Scissors I (2004); Charlene Murray Zatloukal Don’t Play With Scissors (2011); Kaveh Irani Lady & Scissors (2014); Henri Matisse with scissors (1948); Vladimir Kush Scissors (1941); Richard Diebenkorn Scissors XI (1959)

 

Regina José Galindo’s practice is the embodiment of Akira Kurosawa’s dictum, “To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes,” and she challenges the viewer to do the same. Much of her work deals with political violence, especially against women–and it’s not pretty. In one of her most graphic works, titled Himenoplastia (Hymenoplasty) she videotapes her own (botched) hymen reconstruction surgery.

 

Japanese artist Sachiko Abe sits in a white gown, cutting countless sheets of A4 paper into thin, wispy strips. For the performance piece known as Cut Paper, Abe sits for hours on end meticulously shredding paper whose cut feathery strands measure a mere 0.5mm in width. She first began this practice while in a mental institution over 15 years ago because it proved to be a calming activity.

 

In this performance Yoko Ono sat on a stage and invited the audience to approach her and cut away her clothing, so it gradually fell away from her body. Challenging the neutrality of the relationship between viewer and art object, Ono presented a situation in which the viewer was implicated in the potentially aggressive act of unveiling the female body, which served historically as one such ‘neutral’ and anonymous subject for art. Emphasizing the reciprocal way in which viewers and subjects become objects or each other, Cut Piece also demonstrates how viewing without responsibility has the potential to harm or even destroy the object of perception.

 

You are invited to join performance artist, Caroline Wright, in a presentation of Manicure at Ham House and Garden, Richmond, on Wed 15 August 2012, as part of Garden of Reason. We need around 100 volunteers to assist the artist in cutting a large area of grass into a pattern reflecting the black and white chequerboard floor of the Great Hall. We will attempt to do this in one day using only hairdressing scissors. Manicure recreates the past endeavour of the garden staff, creating a lawn by cutting the grass by hand. The artist takes this to an extreme by using scissors, symbolising the power of the aristocracy and the status in the 17th-century of a well-trimmed lawn.

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Misc.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, TM! Me too, about getting it, I guess obviously, considering my George Miles ‘shrines’. I think such an inclination and pursuit is ouchless, or should be? Ah, great great about the novel, nailing the ending and finding the interior’s architecture. I know what you mean. Oh, man, that’s fantastic! I hope/assume/guess that Martin and Karolina will video that event and make it everyone’s. Yes, such a relief to finally be headlong into the film, I can’t tell you. And so much work, of course, but hey. Thanks for the link. I’ll go watch the clip as soon as this thing is launched. You sound great. Such a great sound! xoxo. ** David Ehrenstein, Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein says we should read this book. Also, he continues to be in dire financial straits, so please give him a little help if you can find it in your heart and your own finances. His gofundme is here. Thank you very much! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Welcome back! Is it raining? Are you the epitome of relieved? We’re still in a sweet spot here, and I think we have a few days before it goes back up, but thankfully not too back up. Yeah, finding the performers is gigantic. It cements and changes everything. Also, say, in the case of the person we want to play the mother, if she agrees, it will instantly make that character more important than she was in the script itself because she offers so much to work with. So, the film grows and changes depending on the cast. That’s happened with our earlier films too. For instance, we were so excited by the boy who agreed to play Leon’s Friend in ‘PGL’ that the character, who’d been kind of a side figure in the script, became a real focus when we shot the film because he kept being so great at everything. A Coleman stove shrine, ha ha. I wonder if there is one out there. I bet. Love changing the national anthem of Hungary into the sound of someone opening and closing a pair of scissors for a minute and a half, G. ** Tosh Berman, I saw some photos of your shrine to your mother on Facebook, and it’s very beautiful. I hope dismantling it isn’t too heavy. I can tell you for absolutely sure that at least my writing saved me from being a lifelong basket case. And it didn’t cost me anything. Of course it also didn’t earn me a whole lot of anything either but hey! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. My bedroom was plastered with rock hero photos too. Cozy. Fucking solicitor. You’re being tough, man. And so are we, frankly, having been deprived of our doses of Play Therapy for so long. Patiently twiddling my thumbs. Like you, I imagine. ** Steve Erickson, No, we’re not seeking actors from that realm particularly, but we will be seeking a production manager and set builders either from that world or with good familiarity with it. Everyone, Harken! Steve speaks! Steve: ‘My essay, ‘The Full Horror of Nostalgia,” was published today on Emily St. James’ blog. However, it’s behind a paywall, only available to her subscribers. [And] my August music roundup for Gay City News, covering Demi Lovato, digifae and Doechii, is also out.’ You should be able to figure out that interface, it would seem? ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Thanks. Yeah, I think that might be one of my all-time favorite blog posts, push comes to shove. I did like Tall Dwarfs, yes. I haven’t listened to them in many ages. I’ll look for that comp. So, yes, indeed. I am working on the short fiction right now. Pretty soon the film will eat everything, so I’m trying to do some power work on the fiction now while I have a bit of free time. It’s going okay, I think. I think? How is your novel behaving at the moment? ** Robert, Hi, R. Yes, that title kind of jumped out at me. Ha ha, Mark Hamill, yes. I used to know a guy who was really upset about what the car accident-forced nose job that Hamill had between ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Empire Strikes Back’ did to his looks that he made lots and lots of scrapbooks full of pix of him before the change, and I don’t know for sure, but I think he privately worshipped those scrapbooks. No, my parents didn’t hunt, and my grandma didn’t either. I don’t know how she ended up learning that skill set. Unfortunately there’s no one alive to ask. The famous Chicago airshow. Even I know about it. Dude, totally go. No brainer. Does it happen sort of over the river, or am I imagining that? Have expected huge fun this weekend. ** Travis (fka Cal), Hi! Wait, Cal, like the Cal I and the blog know so well? In any case, awesome that it hit home. How are you? What’s going on? I hope summer is being your overheated friend. xo. ** Right. If you play close attention to this weekend’s post, you will be a world’s expert on scissors by Monday morning. See you then.