Get Inside the Head of a New York City Christmas Tree: A Gonzo Short Film from Artist Nina Katchadourian

For every year this Christmas tree

Brings to us such joy and glee

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree

Such pleasure do you bring me…

All over New York City, tree stands are springing up like mushrooms.

Unlike the fanciful windows lining 5th avenue, the Union Square holiday market, or Rockefeller Center’s tree and skating rink, this seasonal pleasure requires no special trip, no threat of crowds.

You could battle traffic, and lose half a day, dragging the kids to a cut-your-own farm on Long Island or in New Jersey, but why, when the sidewalk stands are so festive, so convenient, so quintessentially New York?

The vendors hail from as far away as Vermont and Canada, shivering in lawn chairs and mobile homes 24-7.

What befalls the unsold trees on Christmas Eve?

No one knows. They vanish along with the vendors by Christmas morning.

The spontaneous cooperation of two such vendors was critical to artist Nina Katchadourian’s “Tree Shove,” above.

Katchadourian, who may look familiar to you from Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style, recalls:

My friend Andrew had been hearing me say for years that I wanted to be shoved through one of those things and he found two friendly Canadians selling Christmas trees in a Brooklyn supermarket parking lot and worked it out with them.

The result is highly accessible, gonzo performance art from an artist who always lets the public in on the joke.

Add it to your annual holiday special playlist.

Watch The Insects’ Christmas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Starring a Cast of Dead Bugs

When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Get Inside the Head of a New York City Christmas Tree: A Gonzo Short Film from Artist Nina Katchadourian is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3qZRbbc
via Ilumina

Comments

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring than anyone has before through a newly released 10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...

Arts and Culture

Search This Blog