some stuffs

i've been bumming out about the state of art in my life lately. i haven't had the time, energy, or facilities for meaningful artmaking, and my pessimism about the audience for art has only deepened. who sees our art, who places it in a historical context, and who the fuck cares? and yet, i don't want to give up or admit defeat by the system. maybe one day i'll find a place for my idealism.

two drawings of something i don't have a lot of:



and the second installment of normativity & robots:

recipe for success

a recent trend i've noticed in band names is the formula (gothic reference) + (illicit substance) + (band/club). i.e. black rebel motorcycle club; band of horses; band of skulls; codeine velvet club. the best name i've been able to come up with using this formula is 'band of heroin pirates'. you?

the sky is beautiful today

poker face

re: this article

i was lamenting to my roommate the other day about the lack of counterculture grrl icons in contemporary media. back in the 90s, i could bust myself up like courtney love, shoplift like winona ryder, go home to daria on mtv, and plan my lilith fair outing to the angry, angry sounds of fiona apple. these were women who were tough, angry, and messy, but who were still accepted as a legitimate and desirable expression of counterculture.

what do we have now? avril lavigne getting married. rihanna getting beaten up by chris brown. gwen stefani hawking handbags. hillary clinton getting served by barack obama in the 2008 primaries (AHEM). women seem to have been reabsorbed into commercial culture, and 'rebel' is just the title of a spread in a fashion magazine. but then there's lady gaga. lady gaga defies all rational thought - this is a woman who prances around with a silicone penis jutting out of the middle of a psychedelic space-alien jumpsuit. her name makes me think of gag reflexes. and she's massively, commercially popular. the rise of lady gaga as an expression of alternative sexuality, i think, is representative of a shift in the movement for sexual equality - instead of focusing purely on women and their misbehavior, the sexual dialogue of the 00's is about queers, transsexuals, and yet-to-be-named forms of gender construction.

january projects

things are settling and i'm slowly getting my life in order. my hands smell like alligator from... cooking alligator this morning. touching it felt like touching my boyfriend's flesh. i was thoroughly grossed out, and will probably never cook meat again, no matter how novel the source. ANYWAY,

1. i am in the process of redoing my website, carolstardust.com. if you have been faithfully following my work (HA!), chances are you've seen most of the work before. it's organized a little differently, which might prompt new insights. at least, it helped me write a fairly coherent artist's statement. check it out and TELL YOUR FRIENDS!

1.a. i'm thinking about making flipbooks of my drawings/animations for sale. or screenprinted clothing out of some of my drawings? would you wear passive aggressive line drawings?

2. i'm applying for a fellowship/grant thing this summer to do um, community/nonprofit/public art stuff. fingers crossed. i like the egotism of seeing my own exhibition history, so i'll also be working on augmenting that.

3. i'm starting my own comic visual journal about my life as a dejected twentysomething. basically, a formalization of what i already rant/draw about on a daily basis.


4. i brought back a bunch of family photo negatives from the last time i visited my family. i plan to organize them and print them as an ode to memory, family dysfunction and happy accidents. i also want to start a career in which i curate people's family photographs for shits, giggles, and a livable amount of money.

5. i'm still making doodles at work.


5.a. i'm trying to get better at my job. luckily, that involves a lot of trips to the art and architecture bookstore, as well as watching snooty art films. and going to coachella :-).

final video

hand in hand in a violent life

sacrificial pigeon, starbucks cup

hypnos part 2

when i went to sleep i had a strange dream. i was part of a rebel faction, made up of my coworkers, in a 7-storied world, the floors of which were accessible by elevators. the world was a strange combination of interior, which referenced libraries and commercial coffeeshops, and exterior 19th century french buildings. our task was to overcome a darth-vader-esque figure and his dark armies in order to reach the buddha, who was stationed on the 7th floor. when i returned from kicking demon ass on the 5th floor, my commander gave me one more task. i was to retrieve the four legs of a table to present to the buddha. each leg had a figure carved into it such as a slave and a lamb, whose outlines were painted red. i was hesitant to accept the task at first, but then saw that one of the legs featured a man and a woman facing each other in fetal positions. i exclaimed that it represented the origin of love, which was a noble thing to retrieve. my coworkers cheered me on, while floating in a pool. somewhere in there, there was an oncoming train.

hypnos part 1

what kept me awake in bed last night was a strange determination to be able to describe my college eateries to someone who had never been to school in upstate new york. my mind wandered over the art student cafe and paused for a sweet moment at the cafeteria in the basement of the humanities building. it was run by a tibetan couple, and attracted tortured humanities grad students as well as senior undergrads aspiring to be tortured grad students. emily and i used to line up for soup every day -- by noon because the line would become absurdly long afterwards. we would always opt for the vegan soup option with a pumpernickel roll. there were about 8 or 9 different soups in rotation, and we speculated daily about the day's soup. the hours spent reminiscing about groundnut and thai carrot, the two clear favorites!

in ithaca, a bleak wintry town with very little amenities, one looked forward to alcohol, sex, and soup -- in other words, things that kept one's body warm. alcohol always resulted in vomiting, headache and regret, and the sex never occurred as frequently as one would have liked. soup remained our one constant source of comfort.

psa

you know, as much as i bitch about digital technology and consumer culture, i have to say that i am happy to live in a world in which responses to the earthquake in haiti can be so instantaneous, multifarious and global. i feel really inspired by all the different grassroots aid movements that have sprung up within minutes of the news' transmission (transmitted across an array of social networks), and the general feeling of a call to arms and a responsibility to the global community. dear world, i am proud of you. this has been a message from the internet to the internet.

potential names for my future 2-womyn classical/punkrawk mashup band

-bach to the future
-i've got your bach
-bach around the clock

with hits such as:
-on the chopin block
-can't handel ur love
-is that a bee in your 'thoven or are you happy to see me?
-rachmaninoff scoff

one of these days i will spike my hair up, tear up some jean skirts and make it happen. at the very least, i'll make some mashups on my computer and call it post-conceptual performance art.

life summary

december was hectic for me. my schedule ran like this: art, travel to parents' house, art, mild social life, art, travel to boyfriend's parents' house, art, travel to nyc to install art, come back home, start working 2 jobs again. i have arrived at the last part of that sentence, stumbling into significant other's darkened bed at midnight last night mumbling jet-lagged thoughts on judy chicago's the dinner party (me: and man was susan b. anthony's vagina plate huge! she had the biggest vagina of them all! he: mmmmf.). a whole new slew of things awaits me on my to-do list, but for the most part, free time is in my life again. this is new to me.

thoughts and drawings and videos and stuff once i rest a bit.

p.s. is this how every young artist feels at the beginning of her twenties? fame and fortune, come soon.

deluge

in the past 10 hours, i have taken a plane from los angeles to new york, taken the subway from john f. kennedy international airport to my alma mater's space in chelsea, reunited with life partners of yore and installed the work for my post-baccalaureate show. two things jump out at me in my sleep-deprived, caffeine-addled state: the ability of our bodies to adjust to drastic climate change, and the luxury of university facilities. in other words, i found me a scanner.

here are some drawings about, um, "relational aesthetics". we normalfolk call it "love".





here's a drawing i made while watching some singer du jour gyrate on a televised new year's eve celebration.



i'm nearing the end of my 13th or so moleskine (plain, black, large, sketchbook, in case you were ever lacking for gift ideas). the cover of each notebook assumes its own character over time, and this one is peppered with stickers from the dangerwork. life has changed a lot in the past 7 months.