artballistics
Caption on face mask reads: “Protect the weak”.
A few months ago I asked a bunch of people to produce or give me an example of how they saw this world right at this moment. Some replied, and the next few weeks, their offerings will be posted in an ongoing series.
The 7th one is by Bo Kenneth Sylvest Jakobsen. It is a provocative street art comment on COVID19. If you like this, do engage and leave a comment. We’d l ove to hear from you.
Caption on face mask reads: “I was lonely”.
A few months ago I asked a bunch of people to produce or give me an example of how they saw this world right at this moment. Some replied, and the next few weeks, their offerings will be posted in an ongoing series.
The 4th one is by Ron Rubenstein. If you like this, do engage and leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you. RR is a bit of an enigmatic character who takes the shots none of us do. He hails from the US and has a tv personality president. Not sure where you go to catch RR these days - last I saw, he was on IG. But I cannot confirm that as I deleted my account. It seems to be that people who lend their artworks to AB, do not post a lot of other places. If you want to see something really lush by RR go here (these are some of my favorite photographies in existence).
Edited mobile shot / random tunnel is Aarhus
First two contributions in State of the World Visual Address are out. Apparently, that has inspired others to jump in, so we might have an ongoing thing on our hands. That sounded almost dirty, if not oddly romantic too. There’s a possiblity that we might look into charity. Both me and MJS have a soft spot for youths in dire straits, so, why not?
We are still interested in contributors in general, but we are just not the kind of people to chase after you, beg you or kiss your ass. The idea of a collective and a synergy where we use each others circles to get further out without doing much SOME, is still a sound one. Too much art languishes in the dark because there is too little trust artists between. I am talking about artistry here - other photographers are still ‘a problem’, and unless you are a teacher leading students, I do not understand photo walks. But that is NOT to say artists cannot band together. They should - and we should be honest with each other. Way too many fence sitters concerned with ‘keeping up appearances’ ruin our chances of having a real, fruitful discourse. Just be fucking real instead of always trying to position yourself, or be something you are not.
That is my main grievance with people. Fly your flag, claim your divinity, but back it up with skills. Nobody wants to hear who your friends are, or that you had coffee with the 3rd cousin of Banksy in a London pub only three people know of. Seriously, cancel poser culture. And be interesting - not coy, not reserved, not arrogant etc. - interesting, suspenseful, confrontational, passionate, alive, awake, in love - be those things.
We will try and monetise this a bit, maybe for charity as well as the daily run of it. But there is still a lot of work to be done. I wish you all a nice weekend.
Remember to check the contributions for ‘State…’
Imagine if you will Boris and his "Bullingdon Boys" talking of jolly japes guffawing out loud at their outlandish behaviour their collective arses covered by their privilage, trashed restaurants, hotel rooms and pigs heads notwithstanding is this really the acceptable background and remit for someone to run the country.
The characteristics he displayed at Oxford – entitlement, aggression, amorality, lack of concern for others – are still there, dressed up in a contrived, jovial image. It’s a mask to sanitise some ugly features. They "the boys" treated certain types of people with absolute disdain, and referred to them as ‘plebs’ or ‘grockles’, and the police were always called ‘plod’. Their attitude was that women were there for their entertainment, to do with them whatever they wished. Among them was the former Prime Minister David Cameron and George "Austerity" Osbourne a fine bunch of individuals? Well I leave that up to you to decide.
Johnson's total lack of morality and his penchant for lying is excused by those around him as "Oh it's just Boris being Boris" Really!! Portrayal of him as an irrasicable charmer running his hand through his mop of hair like a spoiled child is dangerous as this paints him as harmless when he is anything but. Class to him is the get out of jail card, the product of a privileged background, all grace and favor, the cheque book bailout if all else fails. It's hardly the credentials of an upstanding citizen.
His grotesque portrayal of ethnic minorities is another failure of his "class" upbringing, couched in terms of colonialism his references to black people as "piccaninnies with watermelon smiles" and muslim women in burkhas as nothing more than postboxes is an affront to common decency and downright racist. When challenged about this Johnson characterised it like this "I like to think my instincts, in this respect, are as blameless as those of the average person; and the thing is, I am guilty nonetheless. Not of racism, I hope, but of spasms of incorrectitude, soon over, soon regretted". Well that's fucking alright then! Hand slap to forehead…
He leaves behind him a trail of failed relationships and "bastard" children the number of which is unknown as again the cheque book defence came in handy to keep that tally out of the public domain. His failure to accept responsibility for anything is self-evident in the way he distracts, waffles and bluster's through the present crisis of the pandemic, plausible deniability his weapon of choice. His animated delusional obsession of leaving the EU without a deal is on display everyday, his use of latin phrases used as a warrior would use a shield, to deflect from his inadequacy, his continued use of language which is often a mixture of unexpected metaphors or turns of phrase, hyperbole, and nostalgia, very often with a particularly British twist such as piffle, mugwump and nincompoop.
All the character traits listed here are the sum of the parts of a public facade to absolve Boris Johnson of the reality that he is in fact of a lesser intelligence than he and his entourage would have us believe, personally I blame his parents, siblings and educators who have allowed him to become the person he is today a self obsessed misogynist, a racist and narcissist, a fucking good slap early on in life would have knocked the "braghard" out of him and sending him through a normal educational system would have stood him in better stead than the cloak of privilege which hangs loose upon his rounded shoulders.
So when Boris and his "Classmates" drive us over the Brexit cliff edge all those who voted for him and his cronies will have those immortal words ringing in their collective ears "Well it's just Boris being Boris".....
© M.J. Sabine 2020
Well, we have turned About into a sort of splash page which, hopefully, will make for easier navigation for first time visitors. We are looking into self upload on the square space platform, to make it easier for a contributor to autonomously manage their output, making for a more active site, but still curated and debated - this must never become something akin to photo sharing sites - I am pretty sure we all would prefer obscurity to a scenario like that.
But we/I are not funded by anyone or have sources of income. We are basically two contributors at the moment, a number that needs to increase - but we also need to branch out, maybe with a youtube channel. I have personally been slow to do things, but that aspect is nearing an end, as I will put most of my personal shit up on AB and nowhere else.
So we are considering funding, but we do not feel confident that we have enough of a concept yet to start using Patreon for example, or even try and find some start up money. Our branding is reluctant, and it always will be - in short, we do not even want people living on the surface of life to follow the site or contribute.
We want a paradigm shift in how you consume art, popular culture and the like. Do not just scratch the surface, break it instead, stick your arm in and yank something out - anything - be it black, dark and nasty or indeed white, lofty and positive. Real art is not easy, it is fucking hard - it breaks you and kills you only to build you up again, it flies in the face of corruption and never aids it - you want proof? Take Salvador Dali, the only thing that exonerates this fascist asshole (he was a prick of a human being), is his incredible art. Ezra Pound, HP Lovecraft etc - the list is long of people that partially did not know any better, or were just bad apples. That will never keep me from reading them on my terms, or marvel at their output. Such is the power of art.
/Zaar Riisberg
We are about process, art, critique. Critique is needed to create better. We are about video as well as stills, about canvas as well as technique. We hold each other to a higher standard, while we seek to appeal to not only a few. The focus of Artballistics is the ‘worthwhile’, the opposite of thumbing, as it were. Just like sex, art and creation get better and more immersive the more you focus on it.
I have asked some people to participate that bewildered tell me they are not photographers. It was never the intention of AB to be exclusionist in that way, which Eskild Krogh’s contributions show. You have to think of AB as a reaction to ‘the new old world’. We were entering an age of science, arts and reason when it, quite literally, blew up in our faces because we forgot to educate the broad masses - oh, and oops, did not eliminate poverty.
We have entered an age of stupidity and greed instead - the age of the CEO, corporate shells and a system that only sees you as a consumer. To combat that we need charm, art, humor, satire, wit and guile. We need to eliminate the noise and focus.
New stuff includes 2 new blogs coming up and stuff from Rubenstein and Sabine.
Text by Zaar Riisberg
Ron is one of my favorite photographers. Forget Gump, but it is kind of a box of chocolates dealing with Ron. Combined with a raw style, not very often imbued by lots of editing - but bare, or naive, as Martin Sabine put it. Naive here, being a good thing, a conscious thing. So many people are semantically challenged, so I thought I would underscore that. The above one he sent me after I asked contributors for their version of 'the lone tree'. Not very lone, this one, but you get that trees might feel alone in the big city. Until a car rams into them and it is love at first sight.
He also has a keen eye for interesting stuff. Which is one of my modes myself, not seldom does something grab my attention, with my mind going 'hey, wtf was that, and what can I do with it' or 'fuckin hell, that looks different'. Click. Snap. Home. We did have a small voyeur discussion here on AB. I wonder - because this certainly evokes a stalker feeling. But the scene is probably nothing of the sorts. It is called 'conveying', for those of you wondering.
This is the kind of shot that I just love. It is how I see the world - it's a geometry of particles, compartmentalized, nothing ever touching and none of it really exists. No people or actors, yet the stage plays it out by itself, and proves you do not need action to tell a story, if you can rattle the brain of your audience. The last one was originally posted on IG.
Text by Zaar Riisberg
I have known Eskild for quite a few years now - his sense of light and being is extreme in one so young - and he has been that way ever since I met him. I have seen him furious, but also seen him never taking it out on people. He has a rare passion that you can fuel - Imagine throwing Kafka, Dostojevski and Nietzsche at someone, and see them eat it up and ask for another portion. Backing the truck up, it all started with me showing him Albert Camus' The Stranger and telling him I wanted to do a film on it. Like me, he soon fell for Mersault.
Eskild is a filmmaker and storyteller with a talent for mixing new impulses with old school storytelling. His portrait of a young kid's sense of what a mother should be in Noumenon - tackles a hard theme in a low budget film with amazing cinematography - that is basically Eskild Krogh at the core: water from a rock.
These two videos confirm that postulate. If Nebula does not have you by the balls, you are either female or blind. It is one of those rarest of things, where you do not know what the fuck you are looking at, but you do not care, because it takes your mind on a journey across the universe to a place where time does not exist, a place that tenderly taunts you by dangling all the answers in front of you -everything you possibly could want to know- but packaged in such a way that only your heart and soul can know what they cannot formulate. Your frontal lopes left in the dark.