During the stretching sessions of my dance courses, I often happen to broadcast Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal piece and while working on the elongation of specific muscles & muscle group, I ask my students to focus on the experience of fascination, which I interpret to be at the crossroads of the imaginary and the corporeal.
Rather than asking how one would have to define the ontological status of fascination, I actually wonder why fascination proves to be a paradigm “par excellence” to cover, that is to say, both nominate and legitimate, contemporary artistic experience?

Pleased to meet you, pleased to have you on my plate
your meat is sweet to me
your destiny
your fate

i’m the spark, make the world explode
i’m a man-eating machine, i’ll make the world explode
corporate cannibal…

Predrag Pajdic is a London based art historian, editor and curator (graduated from Central St. Martins and the Courtauld Institute of Art) who has been exhibiting and curating in the UK and internationally, as well as writing and lecturing on contemporary art.
Sang Bleu will be featured in the show he is curating in London in May, Lingering Whispers.

Does self expression flourish under pressure? Is creativity at its most acute in times of social, political and financial crises? More than anything, do the arts provide hope during periods of extreme difficulty? Asks Predrag Pajdic.

image © Barney Ashton

Lingering Whispers
06 May – 06 June 2010
Opening reception 06 May 2010 from 6.30 P.M.
Crypt, St Pancras Church
London NW1 2BA,
United Kingdom

Exhibited artists: Dom Agius, Errikos Andreu, Barney Ashton, Milijana Babic, Joachim Baldauf, Stefania Bonatelli, Wren Britton, Carolyn Cowan, Fran Dileo, Alexandra Eldridge, Devin Elijah, Manuel Estevez, Roberto Foddai, Al Giga, Frances Goodman, Christophe Haleb, Katharina Hesse, Daniel Holfeld, Kobi Israel, Pascale Lafay, Scooter Laforge, Emiliano Lazzarotto, Mark Mander, Tupac Martir, Katarina Mootich, Michal Ohana-Cole, Maflohé Passedouet, Petra Reimann, Ricci/Forte, Pato Rivero, Yvonne De Rosa, Mauro Santucci, Iris Schieferstein, Erick Soler, Tapio Snellman, Wolfgang Stiller, Christopher Stribley and Cyrille Weiner.

I’m sure his dad would be for Midwestern values; he would be for families; he would be for a firm handshake; he would be for a little awkwards sweet-talking with the waitress at the dinner; he would work at one of those farm owned by a big international corporation that was created from family farms fone defunct. His mom would have once won a beauty context. They would have gotten married after dating a long while. His mom, probably on accound of her beauty crown, would be eager for his dad (and Wolfgang too, beacuse he would have showed up pretty soon) to get some of that American fortune all around her. She would be hopeful. She would be going to get her some.
At the age of 15, Wolfgang would have heard that the guy next door (a used-camera salesman nobody liked) had dead teenagers in the basement.

Above: As it says, the lights of Wolfgang in the Rufino Tamayo Museum in México (May 2008).

SB contributor and friend Aaron Schuster will defend his doctoral dissertation:

“The Trouble With Pleasure: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis”

on Friday, March 26 at 3pm at The Cardinal Mercier Hall, Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (BELGIUM).

No idea if this is a public defense, but I thought we should all know it. Hopefully, Aaron will be then sundered from life, and death will become shy of him.

Robert Gardner usually has no storyline for his films, and no clear developmental structures either, only some motifs and a few thematic notions wandering around. His interests are to look for that which is an apt symbol or sign and, at the same time, is “distinctive in and of itself”.
In Hamar, occasionally, a woman will be asked by a man to carry the scars he has earned by killing en enemy, but more frequently they ask them to be done for reasons of their own, and because “women look better with than without them”. (Rivers of Sand, 1973, 83 min)

TkH (Walking Theory or Teorija koja Hoda in Serbian) is an opening collective lecture and discussion about the Walking Theory platform practice in last 10 years. Theory is still considered as something practiced in cabinets, in research institutes, as well as something that castrates the art practice. With the name, TkH – Walking Theory, we emphasize that theory is always also a (social) practice, that it is a relevant, potent and socially intervening agency, which cannot be separated from the art practice, let alone be its adversary. In order to stress its performative function we explore the potentialities of performance as a new scientific/theoretical paradigm but also promote the idea of performing arts as a critical concept that characterizes spectacle-based society in which we live. In this light, the main question is: How to perform theoretical practice on paper (TkH Journal); in a more traditional performance geography (stage, gallery, classroom) but also in electronic and digital media and institutional contexts from university to sport? And how can theory-as-practice – through collective work, self-organisation and self-education as well as in many resistance tactics – critically transform a given context?

An intervention by TkH will take place on Friday 5th, 7.30pm at the Laboratoires D’Aubervilliers: BE THERE!

More about TkH & interesting links on their website.

Far from artistic considerations, and for the french speaking, here is an interesting blog. A mother’s log on her educational process with her autistic son. It is full for very relevant and sensitive remarks—among others—on the self-perception and body-mapping. Worth reading through for the open and scientific-minded.

Le blog d’Alexandre