Today I was googling how to create hand drawn typefaces and I found a great video about Typography by Off Book PBS arts. I really thought that this was a great video and I tried to find more videos by Off Book PBS arts. And I found one about . In this documentary two female artists are portrayed, one of them fascinated me because she makes painfully large crocheted patterns.

Agata Olek says about herself that she loves to crochet, because it allows her to watch films while doing her artworks.

She is not a yarn-bomber but an artist. She says “I wish I could crochet even faster… I wish my hands would not hurt… I wish my back would be stronger…”

Here is a film about an artwork done in late December 2010. It covered an artwork by Arturo Di Modica, who installed his sculpture “Charging Bull” in Wall Street in 1989 without permission to do so. The crocheted cover was removed and torn by a park caretaker two hours after being installed.

Agata Olek is a street artist. Born 1978 in Poland she moved to New York City in 2000. Very little is known about her personally. She says about her balloon installations that balloons represent “the happy moments in life – which are often just as impermanent”. She also says the balloons remind her of the times when she worked as a travelling clown for Health Plus and would visit poor New York neighbourhoods.

Olek has an exhibition in the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in NYC until today (March 23rd 2013). This show is about a court case she has been involved in (and was condemned for) after having had a physical dispute with an aggressive male patron in a bar. Since then she has been collaborating with women artists all around the globe and engaging in a frenzy of artistic works like crocheted boxing gloves, decorative doily skulls, butterflies, and half-naked mer-people dining lavishly on and around a knitted table where a crocheted skeleton is seated. Words in her works include “Happiness is an Inside Job,” “Karma Has No Deadline,” and “Being Beautiful on the Inside is What’s Important HAHA Not Really.” A feeling of having survived underwater in a sunken ship is conveyed in this installation in reference to her violent experiences.

Video Credits: “The End is Far”, solo exhibition, Feb 23rd – March 23rd, 2013 Jonathan LeVine Gallery, a SURREEL film by Garrett Kafchinski, Adam Girgenti, Lauren Barber, produced by Rocky Ziegler and David Hausen
Image Credits: http://www.oleknyc.com
Watch some of her other videos .

Besides Tracy Enim there is another “cousin” of mine out there that uses swear words and words to create content which surprises.
This is the statement made by Linus on the Calligraphuck website:

“Greeting cards are boring. The entire billion dollar industry is built on fake… nevermind, we’re not going to get into that argument. Suffice it to say that, even of most men hate them, greeting cards are a necessity. With Calligraphuck, they can be fun too. Why? Because they’re beautifully typeset, calligraphic, letter pressed cards emblazoned with profanity. If there’s anything we can get behind more than a sweet card that looks nice and also has the word fuck on it in huge letters we can’t think of what it is off the tops of our heads. Please throw $25 at this Indiegogo project so we can all start giving cards that express what we’re actually feeling.”

Shop here to buy these great cards printed in the letterpress technique by The Hungry Workshop.

Tracey Emin transforms rape, drugs, anorexia into puns. The title of her exhibitions seem like lines of poems: Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, No New Thing Under the Sun, From Army to Armani, It’s not me that’s crying it’s my soul, I Think it’s in my head, Praying To A Different God, Why I Never Became a Dancer,…

Emin shows herself, her hurtful moments and tainted thoughts in a very direct and exhibitionistic way. Along the way she created an impressive amount of commercial traces of consciousnes. The sentences she uses in her work are often tragic and funny at the same time. Tracey Emin uses painful situations and transforms them to art. She is a storyteller and vice versa often uses the conext of the art market to purposefully mould artificial situations of pain.

1974 Joseph Beuys made a performance that he called “I Love America and America Loves me”. He lived in an art gallery with wild coyotes. This was supposed to be a reconciliation with wild life. 1966 Tracey Emin locked herself in an art gallery for 2 weeks. She had nothing there except empty canvases and art materials – she wanted to make peace with herself and her art. There were lenses in the wall for the audience to ba able to watch her. This 14 day session began with artworks of artists she admired (e.g. Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Yves Klein) and resulted in a vast amount of autobiographic material.

In her autobiography “Strangeland” Tracey Emin talks about her life. She tells of a non-abortion that her life began with and an abortion that started her career as a successful artist. The mother wanted to abort her and her bother Paul. The father was a hotel-owner, married to another woman. The mother did not manage to abort, so Paul her twin brother and Tracey were born. The lover became an absent dad.

“When I was born they thought I was dead”, says Tracey about her birth. Her first cry came late. This delay and the morbidity that lies therein she interprets as a theme for her life. Her recipe for success is the humorous way and shifted context of peace-making with her terrifying past: her memories of child abuse, not eating until her teeth became stomps, bed wetting, shame, rape, followed by a phase of intensive promiscuity, depression, alcoholism, being made fun of. Her unmade bed (that almost but didn’t win the Turner prize in 1999) is almost as famous as is the shark of Damien Hirst.

Image credits: Saatchi Gallery.
Video credits: .