June 24th, 2015
Today ruled. Started the day with a workshop taught by Czech lighting and installation artist, Marie Jirásková. Her english was not super great, so she had a rad, spritely, tattooed young student of hers translate. We spent the first hour or so looking at slides of her work- a few of which are below. She is very playful and whimsical, but with a strong formality to the presentation of her objects… hard to describe but…I really enjoy her work. It’s pretty down to earth. After we got a sense of her aesthetic vocab, she unleashed us onto the street to take photographs of lighting ideas to use as research. People returned with sooo many photos, so we compared research and talked until lunch. While we broke, Marie was busy unloading tons of materials for us to create lighting sculptures. Foam, battery-operated LEDs, beads, broken glass, plastic sheeting, dried branches, fabric, foil, velum, every tool you could imagine… all of the sudden I was revved up, hyper, and totally in my comfort zone! The world feels right when I have a hot glue gun in my hand. So I made a cool little foam vagina sculpture, which inspired other students to design other genitalia sculptures! Ha! I busted it out super quickly because I had to leave the workshop early and catch a PQ Lecture. A few blocks away and a few minutes later I get front row seats to watch Rimini Protokoll’s Stefan Kaegi talk about his work. The theme of the talk was “ The Performative Screen: Bearing Witness and Streaming Resistence”. They are doing really interesting and important work and I can’t wait to see one someday. They have a show where they bought stocks in the Deimler Corporation so that audience members could legally attend their annual shareholders meeting. Pretty genius. A peek into the performative power rituals by a corporation…. So many cool things were said during this lecture. OK- next Lisi and I headed over to Café Louvre, a very old cafe where Einstein and other famous scholars, artists and important rich people have dined for hundreds of years. It was a salon of sorts, and now its just a classy Czech institution that everyone loves. We ordered beautiful reasonably priced food and drank Becherovkas! They we made our way over the a Cinema for a screening of Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She did an off-broadway version of the show last year in Brooklyn, and it seems like on a whim, they decided to film it and make a movie. Its all filmed on stage, so there are no special effects. IT WAS GREAT. Julie Taymor was also there in person to introduce the film and field questions afterwards. She is fucking cool, and smart. She thinks and talks so fast, knows exactly what designers are interested in and want to know about her work. Happy, happy artists. Its now very late and I need sleep! Getting up early to have breakfast with my friend Pegi Marshall, who has two objects in the Objects Exhibit, and is making lemonade tomorrow in the performance kitchen. My new tattoo is super itchy, btw.