Monthly Archive for January, 2011

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Photo Diary: Andean mummies and Peruvian prisons.

By c-monster on January 5, 2011 in C-Monster, Peru, Photo Diary and Sculpture. 1 Comment


Sculpture of an Andean mummy — a work of prisoner art. (Photos by C-M.)

While running around the northern highland city of Chachapoyas, we picked up a small sculpture of a skeleton posed as pre-Columbian mummy. (Many Andean cultures placed the dead in a fetal position prior to burial.) Along with numerous other crafts, the local souvenir stands feature boundless numbers of these mummy carvings in an array of sizes. Many of them are quite crude, but in a small shop near the market, we found one that was quite beautifully done, with a fine attention to detail and proportion. It’s every last vertebrae had been skillfully rendered and there was something poignant about its expression.

I asked the lady who managed the souvenir shop if she knew the name of the artisan who crafted it. She did not. These sculptures, it turns out, are crafted at a nearby maximum security prison, otherwise known as El Penal de Huancas. Apparently, the place is loaded with all manner of unsavory murders, rapists and narcos. A couple of days after we bought the piece, we happened to pay a visit to Huancas and went to see the prison. (From the exterior, since it wasn’t a visitation day.) And I tried to imagine the hands from which my little sculpture emerged.

Pix of the prison after the jump.

Continue reading ‘Photo Diary: Andean mummies and Peruvian prisons.’

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C-Mon Giveaway Extravaganza: Stikman Calendar!!

By c-monster on January 4, 2011 in C-Monster, Calendar, Giveaway and Street Art. 16 Comments

Hey Folks:

The elusive street artist Stikman has given me a copy of his lovingly crafted 2011 wall calendar for a giveaway. Let’s just say y’all are lucky I don’t keep this one for myself.

Leave a comment and this little piece of Fun in the Sun could be all yours.

xox,
C.

P.S. Been having a little work done on the site, so things may look janky until everything is sorted out.

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Calendar. 01.04.10.

By c-monster on January 4, 2011 in C-Monster, Calendar and Photography. Closed


Adam Ekberg, The Arsonist’s Shadow, at Platform Gallery in Seattle. Opens this Thursday, January 6 at 6pm. (Image courtesy of Platform.)

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My ARTnews story on Street Art.

By c-monster on January 3, 2011 in Announcements, C-Monster and Street Art. 3 Comments

Hey Folks:

The January 2011 of ARTnews magazine is hitting stands with a cover story I wrote about the new shape of street art. Specifically, it’s a look at the more abstract, geometric, sculptural and conceptual interventions going down in cities across the globe. (That’s Spanish artist Nuria Mora featured on the cover.) You can read the story online, but may I recommend picking up the mag. The article is illustrated with all kinds of incredible pictures, which you won’t be able to see otherwise.

As part of this, there’s a couple of street art-related tomes that really deserve a plug: Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art and Urban Interventions: Personal Projects in Public Spaces. These are two very thoughtful books devoted to the subject. Definitely check ‘em out.

As always, thank you for reading!

xox,
C.

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What I’m Reading.

By c-monster on January 2, 2011 in Books, C-Monster and What I'm Reading. 5 Comments

The Painted Word, by Tom Wolfe, a breezy book-length essay that tracks the increasingly conceptual, immaterial path of 20th century American art (and the rise and fall of some of its biggest critics).

P. 108 (from the 1987 Bantam printing):

And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a ‘receiver’ that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projects, just ‘the artist,’ in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded of him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode — and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory!

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