Insane Book Art - Book Sculptures

Rome - Das Feuerordal

Roger Ballen's Asylum of the Birds (full film)

The foolish world of ours...

This world of ours is full of foolish creatures too -

Commoners want to build chateaux;

Each princeling wants his royal retinue;

Each count his squires. And so it goes..Jean de La fontaine is still very accurate, look at our world, look at us, look at you...

“Seven Deadly Sins

Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Knowledge without character
Politics without principle
Commerce without morality
Worship without sacrifice.” 
― Mahatma Gandhi

The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy isn’t liberalism. The enemy is bullshit.

''Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.''

Abraham Lincoln

“It is as truly folly for the poor to ape the rich, as for the frog to swell, in order to equal the ox”

Benjamin Franklin

Humans!!!!!!!! are always the same, they never learn. No need to be a french frog to understand this story. Some people call it Ambition, I say it is stupidity. 

  

 One afternoon a grand and wonderful ox was on his daily stroll, when he was noticed by a small haggardly frog. The frog was too impressed with the great ox, impressed to the point of envy. "Look at this magnificent ox!" he called to all his friends, "He's such a grand size for an animal, but he's no greater than I am if I tried."

        The frog started puffing and swelled from his normal size.

     "Am I as large as the wonderful ox?" he asked his friends.

     "No, no, not near as grand as the ox," they replied.So, the frog puffed himself up more and more, trying to reach the state of the ox.

     "Now? now?" asked the frog.

     "No, no. But please, don't try anymore," pleaded his friends.

        But the frog continue to puff and swell, larger and larger until he finally burst. Aesop Fable

(was an Ancient Greek fabulist or story teller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as Aesop's Fables.)

.H      

Have you ever used Flattering? 

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.

 Let me tell you a tale from Jean de La Fontaine of course our French fables writer   

Mister Raven, perched on a tree,
Held a cheese in his beak.

smell,
Addressed him in language 
How pretty you are!  How beautiful you seem to me!
In truth, if your song 
is like your plumage,
You are the phoenix of the hosts of this wood.
At these words the raven becomes overjoyed;
And, to show off his beautiful voice,
He opens his beak wide and lets his prey fall.
The fox grabs it and says: My dear man,
Learn that every flatterer 


thrive on fools' credulity.

The lesson's worth a cheese, don't you agree?"The crow, shamefaced and flustered swore,Too late, however: "Nevermore!

Curb your fretting, tadpole, or the frog of your future will fail to croak.'

And Remember...

Puppets World....L'Adieu

AIME-MOI Charlélie Couture by SKM.mov

zardonic circus of death

FEAR THE FROG: Boiling the frog

FEAR THE FROG: Boiling the frog: They say that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap out right away to escape the danger. To paraphrase Goethe, no one...

Boiling the frog

They say that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water,
it will leap out right away to escape the danger.
To paraphrase Goethe, no one is so completely enslaved as the person who thinks he is free…

So you used to be a Christian fundamentalist, but now you’ve been born again in the fires of hell and baptized in the cold water of atheism. Congratulations.

And while you appreciate all your new free time and ability to think through a situation without superstitiously invoking a deity or fleeing to church, there are also some things you miss about your old faith…

10) Carrying Your Bible

Also known as your “sword,” you were never a moment without that precious cargo. It might have even had a handy carrying case (mine did).  In a moment’s notice you could whip it out and get daily insight from anonymous authors or set your friend straight about the theology of predestination.

9) “Free” Weekly Concerts

 It was so nice to relax, praise your precious beautiful cutsy-wootsy invisible Jesus, and listen to a band play repetitive, simplistic, sappy praise songs. There was never a better time to let your mind wander and think about all the other things you could be doing right now.

And remember that one girl who shouldn’t have been singing? Everyone felt too bad to say anything about it. At least she was hot.

But even though there wasn’t a cover charge, they always passed that pesky basket around asking for 10% of your income… and you sure don’t miss that.

8) The Superiority Complex

There’s something wonderful about feeling like you’re better than everyone else around you.

Whether being too good to watch a certain movie (“they take my precious Savior’s name in vain!”), go to a concert (“is it Christian music?”), or just being weird (“sorry, I have to go to soul crushing witness training class tonight!”), it’s really a shame to feel like you’re just a regular person who doesn’t really know what the hell is going on. :( 

7) Potluck

 Holy fuck, just that word alone got your mouth watering, didn’t it?

Remember the long tables filled with pot roast, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, cornbread, fried chicken, cookies, cake, cupcakes… ok I’m a believer again! Sign me up and pass me the food!   

6) Community

 I mean it’s cool and all to sit at home in your underwear and talk to other enlightened atheists on the internets, but there’s something nice about meeting regularly in a sacred place with people who think similarly.

Plus, chicks in dresses. 

5) Free Daycare

 Admit it — sometimes church was worth it just because they took care of your damn kids.

4) Being Told What To Think

 Thinking is hard. Remember when a guy in a suit got up on a stage and told you what to think? Life was so much simpler back then.

3) Christian Cosplay

Who doesn’t love dressing up in a costume and pretending to be something you aren’t? Putting on some nice clothes, smiling, and spouting memorized Bible verses is a nice change for a lot of people.

Unfortunately, too often things went back to normal on Monday and you found yourself sniffing coke off a hooker’s ass .

2) Christian Bookstores

 …because where else can you get the latest PRAIZIN’ GOD VOL 23 CD, a “God’s Gym” t-shirt, a framed naked baby angel.....

1) Jesus

Yeah, you miss the 2,000 year old mythical man-god. He was your make believe friend — he always listened to you (though never talked back), never judgmental (except when you ate too many M&M’s), and best of all, he was always on your side (mostly because he was a figment of your imagination).

Yet even though these are all things you might miss…

Reality is better.

* * * * *

Like Unreasonable Faith on Facebook!

Metallica & Lang Lang - One Live performance Grammys 2014 HD

The eye of Cuba .....

Alejandro Santiago

Undisclosed desire ......

Take me! I am the hallucinogenic! 

Why I came here ? ... I came to do in this world, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.

Bertil Nilsson

One eye sees, the other feels.

Bernardi Roig

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

Chris Devour

Do you know what he told me ? ..."You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” ....

Adam Batchelor

   The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art .

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Richard Serra - Talk with Charlie Rose (2001)

Gimme Shelter | Playing For Change

CENSORED.....

     

Censorship in America.....

No I am not politically correct, nor am I correct at all ...what should be or not politically correct should not be held on the hands of deeply ignorant people.

With a brief reprieve after the ‘90s culture wars, it looks as though the tide is shifting back in the direction of visual art censorship, particularly with the incoming GOP Congress and its disdain for expression that is not squeaky clean. And the war is being fought from the halls of Congress -- as with the much-publicized Smithsonian dismissal of “A Fire in My Belly” -- to perpetually conservative points of consumerism -- as with retail outlets’ disdain for Kanye West’s album cover painted by American artist George Condo. Most nefarious are those instances when museums, galleries and other outlets for art practice self-censorship, preemptively or not, to avoid controversy. The very last place artists should fear morality police are the institutions that are meant to support them, and the willful abnegation of free speech is dangerous indeed.

Here are artists who were banned, censored or arrested, evoking controversy and setting precedents in visual art: 

sculptor Frederick MacMonnies’ "Bacchante and Infant Faun"

To our modern eyes, sculptor Frederick MacMonnies’ "Bacchante and Infant Faun" could hardly be more innocuous. A naked but desexualized image of the Roman wine deity, cast in bronze and holding a child, its litheness seems countered only by its gaiety. But in 1854, when architect Follen McKim tried to mount it in the courtyard of the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, a huge scandal erupted around the very qualities that seem so innocent today. The statue’s “drunken indecency” greatly offended the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, it seemed, and they had enough pull in the city that McKim thought better of his gift and shipped the Bacchus down to liberal New York. It resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art to this day, and partly as a result of the uproar surrounding it, MacMonnies became world-famous for the sculpture.

Jean Toche, Flyers, 1974. In 1974, Jean Toche, co-founder of the situationist Guerrilla Art Action Group, mailed 30 flyers to museums and galleries throughout New York City criticizing their exhibition policies as bourgeois and exclusionary. In particular, he was defending what he believed was the artistic right of Tony Shafrazi to deface Picasso’s “Guernica,” having spraypainted the words “KILL LIES ALL” across the masterpiece in a protest against Vietnam and a purported effort to snatch it back from the gullet of history.

Toche’s defense wasn’t incendiary in itself, though the GAAG built its reputation on anti-war “happenings” inside museums, including one 1969 incident that ended with animal blood spewed all over the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. Where he got himself into trouble was this passage in the flyer’s text:

We now call for the kidnapping of: museum’s trustees, museum’s directors, museum’s creators, museum’s benefactors, to be held as war hostages until a People’s Court is convened, to deal specifically with the cultural crimes of the ruling class, and with decision of sanctions, reparation and restitution, in whatever form decided by the People and the Artists.

Though his “kidnapping” was meant to be symbolic, the FBI is not known for its subtlety as art critic, and immediately arrested him at the behest of a presumably more nuanced critic, Douglas Dillion, then-president of MoMA. Toche was compelled by a federal judge to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, after which the charges were dropped. He continues to make political mail art, in caps lock.

3. Blu, MoCa, 2010. It’s remarkable (and confusing) that MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who made his name in New York City by displaying some of the most interesting and innovative contemporary art around in his eponymous gallery for nearly 15 years, would ever censor anything. But that’s exactly what happened in December, after he commissioned the celebrated and controversial Italian graffiti artist Blu to paint a large-scale mural at the museum’s entrance. Their contract was signed without a preliminary sketch, as is Blu’s standard modus operandi. And so, while Deitch attended Art Basel in Miami, Blu worked on his piece: a huge painting of the coffins of war casualties, with dollar bills instead of American flags draped over them.

Blu does not shrink when it comes to making strong statements with his work -- using the dollar bill as a common theme, he’s commented on the varying tentacles of corporate greed since 2000. According to an email conversation between the artist and longtime graffiti archivist Henry Chalfant, Deitch requested Blu paint a different mural over the coffins, “suggesting he would have preferred a piece that ‘invites people to come in the museum’. I told him that i will not to do that, for obvious reasons, and that probably I was not the artist best suited for this task.”

salvator Dali

After Facebook’s censors over-zealously took down a Laure Albin Guillot photograph from the Jeu de Paume’s page and an image of a Gerhard Richter painting from that of the Centre Pompidou, London’s Saatchi Gallery has become the latest victim of the social network’s aesthetic obscurantism. Gallery director Rebecca Wilson told ARTINFO via email that the latest of several offending image that Facebook has removed from their page — and threatened to shut down their account over — is Salvador Dalí and photographer Philippe Halsman’s 1951 collaboration “Voluptas Mors” (above).

“We never post anything that is remotely offensive — unless you think that Michelangelo’s ‘David’ is off limits, or Ingres’s ‘la Grande Odalisque,’ or now, apparently, the work of Salvador Dali,” Wilson wrote. “This is not the first time Facebook has removed works we have posted.  They have also threatened to close down our account if we post further ‘offensive’ images.”

Following the removal of the offending artwork on Sunday, the gallery posted a short note on Facebook that reads: “We are very sorry to report that the post we made yesterday showing a work by Dali has been removed by Facebook. This is yet another example of Facebook’s censorship of artworks posted by galleries and museums.”

“I posted a comment about the removal of the work, without a picture,” Wilson said, “and interestingly it generated over 2500 Likes — or perhaps that should be complaints since each person who commented was outraged.”

What art will Facebook deem offensive next?

Karen Finley, 'The Chocolate Smearing Incident"The late 1980s and 1990s were a tornado of art battles, with Jesse Helms having palpitations over Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic portraits and Andres Serrano’s crucifix-in-a-urinal. But feminist performance artist Karen Finley was the first of the targeted artists to have her NEA grant revoked because of a column written by two reporters scolding her without having even seen her work. Rowland Evans and Robert Novack took a belittling, paternalistic slant on Finley’s act, characterizing the 34-year-old artist as a “chocolate-smeared woman” based on a piece she created about male violence toward women. Ironic! Her NEA solo performance grant was defunded, then refunded, leading to a 1998 Supreme Court case in which she challenged the law that required the NEA to be held up to decency standards. She lost, but not before she got in a retort, 1998’s “Return of the Chocolate Smeared Woman.” This time, the chocolate was smeared liberally. 

Books censored in The United States Of America :

• Mummy Laid an Egg under the title Mommy Laid an Egg was listed as number 82 in the American Library Association's "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000".

• Operation Dark Heart, a 2010 memoir by U.S. Army intelligence officer Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer, is notable for the lengths the U.S. Defense Department went in an attempt to censor information revealed within after the book had already been distributed free of redactions.
• In 2003 the children's book The Family Book was removed from the curriculum of the Erie, Illinois school system due to the book's representation of same sex families.
• In October 2006, a resident of Marshall, Missouri attempted to have the graphic novels Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Blankets by Craig Thompson removed from the Marshall Public Library.
• Barney Rosset, led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and later was the American publisher of Henry Miller's controversial novel Tropic of Cancer.
• NewSouth Books received media attention for publishing an expurgated edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that censored the words "nigger" and "Injun."
• King & King, a controversial children's books that portrayed LGBT themes in a positive light
• Ruth Brown, a librarian accused of providing "subversive" materials to the public and indoctrinating children against the principles of America.
• The inferno of Dante ....a classic
• Fifty Shades of Grey by James E.L.....

Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

             

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

Erik Ravelo

Erik Ravelo  

Cuban artist and creative director Erik Ravelo is used to having his artwork censored. He was, after all, the man behind United Colors of Benetton's UnHate campaign, which featured doctored photos of world leaders making out.

Yet his newest project, a personal artwork unrelated to his career as a creative director, has managed to spark even more controversy "I had people writing me, threatening me."